On the Front Line: Guerilla Poems of El Salvador

``I want to write a letter to peace / and we are doing that,'' says one of the 19 El Salvadorans whose voices unite here in the struggle for freedom. He is identified only as ``Nino, lieutenant of a security unit''--an entirely warranted safeguard, as four of the contributors to this bilingual volume have been slain. Although elegies and odes in praise of comrades are primarily intended to proselytize rather than to startle with unique or novel perceptions, their rhetoric does not annul their lyric powers. From ``To Alphabetize,'' by ``Karla, health worker and literacy teacher alfabetizadora '': ``We taught the alphabet with our / requisitioned boots and our rifles / and thus we learned the word `enemy,' / . . . for the first time with pencil and paper / and we will learn all the words / we have thus far carried in our hearts: / `Victory,' `Love.' '' The selected works are not, however, definitive; the editors ( Ashes of Izalco , a collaborative novel) omit the poems of ``perhaps the exemplary poet-revolutionary,'' Roque Dalton, because, they claim, his verse has already received attention from abroad. (Sept.)