All Cardenal's poetry "debunks," "corroborates," and "mediates" reality. His esthetic principles are clearly ethical, and most of his poems are more than just "vaguely" religious. (p. ix)

[All] eight texts of Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems set out to "document" reality (and so redeem it) in a … dialectically visual way: picturing things, peoples, and events in the light of a clear-cut sociopolitical commitment; selecting, shaping, and imposing interpretative patterns on the world, with liberal use of such filmic "editing" techniques as crosscutting, accelerated montage, or flash frames; and pursuing "the redemption of physical reality" by bringing us "back into communication" with its harshness and its beauty. Poets and cameras can both affect what they record, but whereas a documentary camera's presence conditions the "on-going situation," Cardenal's recording of the present or the past is aimed at helping to shape the future—involving the reader in the poetic...