Fragments from the Fire

When the 75th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory firein which 146 sweatshop workers, mostly teenage girls, perishedwas commemorated last year in Lower Manhattan, only a few of the survivors were there to give testimony to the horror of this watershed of the labor movement. But in the spirit of Doctorow's Ragtime, Llewellyn's highly charged series of narrative poems serves to remind us of the disenfranchised classes of the time. Llewellyn gives voice to the victims and martyrs of the fire, recreates scenes from the disaster and recounts its aftermath: the actions of souvenir peddlers and yellow journalists, the mass funerals and the trial in which a ""Jury of Peers'' found the factory owners not guilty of negligence. The story is simply and effectively told, successfully wedding the imagination of poetry to the facts of history in a kind of cinematic docu-poem. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award for a first book of poems, this book was sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. (March)