To Wake Again

By H. Palmer Hall

Pudding House Publications, $8.95

Antiwar poetry has made a ''comeback'' due to the two invasions in Iraq but, as during all millennia, war continues despite poems written about particular atrocities or against the madness itself.

Poets David Ray and Palmer Hall wrote powerful poetic critiques of the Vietnam War, and offer equally effective poems against the Iraq wars in these recent volumes.

Ray was co-founder of American Writers Against the Vietnam War and co-edited ''A Poetry Reading Against the Vietnam War'' (Sixties Press, 1967). Hall, a translator/interpreter in Vietnam (1967-68), authored ''From the Periphery'' (Chili Verde, 1994).

Hall's poems are deeply meditative and compassionate, turning on news of Iraq and Vietnam flashbacks. In the title poem, he muses calmly on his dreams: ''I have been dreaming lately in Vietnamese/ the people around me speak quickly, tones rising/ and falling. I listen slowly, still remember all/ the words, recall their special meanings: death, old wounds.'' This ends with ''words more beautiful than I had thought, eyes tuned, turned to see, not merely look, for this god of the fundament whispers/ through a thousand leaves. Listen: a short laugh, silence.''

In Hall's ''An Old Story'' the ''latest Hummers .../ roll across Euphrates, approach/ Tigris, eye the hanging gardens in/ that old cradle of Mesopotamia./ Eve reaches once more for the fruit/ and Adam wonders, agape, watches/ precision bombs ...'' Then on to Baghdad: ''crossroads/ of armies for ten thousand years, of/ traders, conquerors, squabbling kings.''

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Perhaps David Ray and Palmer Hall, along with thousands who have published poems against the occupation of Iraq and our so-called war on terror, wish that their poems had not been necessary. Yet because the perversion of language-into-propaganda and the loss of logic and truth always will be the earliest casualties of deadly conflict -- especially when rationalizing a pre-emptive attack -- keepers of the word will protest and antiwar poems will be read.

Poet, critic and publisher Robert Bonazzi 's Poetic Diversity column runs occasionally in Culturas.