Daisy Zamora's Work Examines The Hard Truths Of Life In Central America. By Richard Siken Clean Slate: New and Selected Poems, by Daisy Zamora (Curbstone). Translated by Margaret Randall and Elinor Randall. Paper, $12.95. IT DISMAYS ME that there is a need for the poetry of Daisy Zamora, but there is a need for it, and she has provided for it, and for that I am very grateful. Somehow I had naively hoped that by this point in history we would be able to respect each other regardless of race, gender or ideology, and move forward together to fight other battles. I had hoped that the role of the poet would be liberated from the necessary witnessing of injustices and be able to turn its attention to sheer celebration--blasts of pure lyric rising up from the throat to shimmer in the air for the simple pleasure of it. Obviously, this has not happened yet. And though Daisy Zamora has much to celebrate, and does celebrate it, the poetry that rises up out of her throat rings with explosions of a different kind. Born in 1950 in Managua, Nicaragua, into a wealthy, politically active liberal family, Zamora lost her father at an early age through political machinations. In 1967, at the University of Managua, she became politically active, and during the revolution that overthrew the dictator of her native country she was a combatant in the National Sandinista Liberation Front and director of Radio Sandino's clandestine programs. Yes, Daisy Zamora is a political poet, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think. Ultimately, Daisy Zamora is trying to do one simple thing: She is trying to be herself. But for a woman in Latin America, speaking out for yourself is a political act. Though many of the poems in this collection address the conflicts and landscapes of the Nicaraguan struggle, the power here lies in Zamora's attention to the personal. She has no hidden political agenda, but she does challenge the cultural inheritance that would encourage her silence. Clean Slate: New and Selected Poems includes poems from La violenta espuma (The Violent Foam) and En limpio se escribe la vida (Clean Slate) as well as 11 new, previously unpublished poems. The English translations appear on the pages facing each of the 55 poems in blank verse. Arranged primarily in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish, the poems vary in length from a few lines to several pages. The translations were done by a mother-daughter team, 82 and 55 years old respectively; the mother produced the first drafts, and the daughter distilled these into their final form. Zamora revised and approved each of the English versions herself, and the Randalls provide occasional footnotes to identify people or events to which the poet refers. Central to this bilingual volume is a long, probing poem that intersperses a Sandinista Radio report of the day's battles for control of Nicaragua with the speaker's more private musings. This continued gesture of returning to the personal accounts for much of the complexity in Zamora's voice, successfully bringing intimate memory into political verse or unexpectedly turning the full force of social commentary loose among the lines of a love poem. This voice, coupled with an attention focused on overcoming the limiting roles proscribed for women by family and society, resonates through both languages of this edition, allowing those who read only English to appreciate Nicaraguan poetry and the writings of one of the greatest women exponents of the recent life and times of that country's people. Vibrant, moving, sensitive, and incisive, these poems celebrate the strength of women surviving both political upheaval and everyday life. In addition to participating in the reclamation of her country, Zamora seems intent on reclaiming a more personal space--one in which women have the permission to write about being the lover as well as the beloved, the fighter as well as the fought over, and the permission to be aware of, recover, and celebrate their own bodies. Daisy Zamora will lead a poetry workshop at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, March 1, as part of the Tucson Poetry Festival. She will read from her works at 2 p.m. Sunday, March 2. Both events will be at the Tucson Center for the Performing Arts, 408 N. Sixth Ave. For more information, call 620-2045.

		© 1995-97 Tucson Weekly . Info Booth