SOURCE: “Verse,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 3, Summer, 1989, p. 459.

In the following review of Un libro levemente odioso, a posthumous collection of Dalton's poetry, Menton singles out for special praise Dalton's poems questioning orthodox communist ideology.

Roque Dalton is unquestionably El Salvador's most internationally known writer, in part because of his revolutionary activities in Cuba and his execution by Salvadoran guerrillas in May 1975. However, his fame also rests solidly on his literary production: Las historias prohibidas del Pulgarcito (1974), an anecdotal, multigeneric history of his country, comparable to Guillermo Cabrera Infante's Vista del amanecer en el trópico and Eduardo Galeano's trilogy Memoria del fuego; the five-hundred-page posthumous biography of Miguel Mármol; and several volumes of poetry.

The work under review [Un libro levemente odioso] is a handsome collection of poems written between 1965 and 1971, illustrated by José Luis Posada, with an introduction by Elena Poniatowska. As the...