SOURCE: A review of Small Hours of the Night: Selected Poems of Roque Dalton, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 243, No. 30, July 22, 1996, p. 236.

In the following review, the writer gives a thumbnail sketch of Dalton's work, praising his extravagance, wry sense of humor, and iconoclasm.

Long overlooked in the U.S., Dalton was born in El Salvador in 1935. He joined the Communist Party and became a guerrilla in the El Salvadoran revolution, producing a massive body of poems before being murdered in 1975. The early poems, those from a young revolutionary, are full of extravagance: “I have this wild itch to laugh / or kill myself” and “I don't believe in angels / but the moon is now dead for me.” As Dalton's poetry matures, his imagination ranges, sometimes recklessly, running from line to line without regard for negative space or silence, but never without passion. “Man uses his old disasters like a...