By TOM MAYO / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Two weeks after Boston and with two more weeks until New York, we are now half-way between the two major parties’ national conventions.  Texas is not a battle-ground state, so the summertime onslaught of television ads has not yet graced our airwaves.  What, then, is a political junkie to do?  The answer, perhaps surprisingly: pick up a volume of poetry.

The not-so-simple truth is that a great deal of poetry exists on a political plane.  Political content may reflect the intentions of the author – whether Sophocles, Whitman, Langston Hughes, or Adrienne Rich – or it may be provided by historical context or the reader’s own personal lens.  Consider (and reconsider) the “apolitical” Emily Dickinson, who wrote half of her 1,789 poems during the four years and three months of the Civil War.

Over the past 12 months we have witnessed a striking convergence of poetry and politics.  Calvin Trillin’s book, Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme (Random House, $12.95), spent weeks this summer on national and local best-seller lists.  Written against a deadline for the weekly political journal, The Nation, these witty little ditties answer the age-old question, “What if Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker’s love child were a Democrat and alive today?”  And, for the record, he was equally tough on Clinton/Gore in the 1990’s.

The most politically galvanic issue this year has been the war in Iraq, and there is no shortage of war poetry to peruse.  The aptly named Poets Against the War (Nation Books, $12.95, paper) came out of Laura Bush’s invitation – later withdrawn – to a handful of prominent poets to come to the White House for an evening of poetry entitled “Poetry and the American Voice.”  One invitee and the editor of this collection, Sam Hamill, created a website to collect antiwar poems for the event and soon had 13,000 of them from 11,000 poets.  Many leading poets are represented in these pages, and the best of their offerings transcend the particulars of the U.S. plan to shock and awe the House of Saddam.  The two oldest contributors (Stanley Kunitz, 97, and Virginia Hamilton Adair, 90) and the youngest (9-year-old Madeleine-Therese Halpert) wrote poems that were both the shortest and among the best.  Is there something about extreme age (old or young) that allows a poet to get quickly to the marrow of the matter?

An anthology with a less specific focus is Old Glory: American War Poems from the Revolutionary War to the War on Terrorism, edited by Robert Hedin (Persea Books, $22.50, paper).  In the Foreword, Walter Cronkite reflects on his years as a war correspondent during WWII and Vietnam and concludes that his “great dispatches . . . failed in their purpose to tell what it was really like.”  His conclusion -- “It seems that the gift of telling what war is really like has been bestowed upon the poets” -- is amply supported by the poems that follow.  Hedin resisted the temptation to include one of his own poems in this book, though “The Old Liberators” would have fit nicely, with lines like these:

Of all the people in the mornings at the mall,
It's the old liberators I like best,
Those veterans of the Bulge, Anzio, or Monte Cassino
I see lost in Automotive or back in Home Repair,
Bored among the paints and power tools.

Their wives are their generals now, and the troops are starting to disappear:

They are almost all gone now,
And with them they are taking the flak
And fire storms, the names of the old bombing runs.

For the old warriors, the reward for those years of violence and danger comes on slowly:

Each day a little more of their memory goes out,
Darkens the way a house darkens,
Its rooms quietly filling with evening,
Until nothing but the wind lifts the lace curtains,
The wind bearing through the empty rooms
The rich far off scent of gardens
Where just now, this morning,
Light is falling on the wild philodendrons.

You can trust an anthologist with this sensibility to produce a collection of impressive scope and consistent quality, and he has.

War Poems, edited by John Hollander (Knopf, $12.50), is even more universal in its selections.  It also confirms the great value to be found in Knopf’s “Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets” series.  Hollander starts with the Greeks and Romans and ancient Chinese writers, stops briefly by Shakespeare’s shop, and finishes by taking us through the Civil War, two world wars and beyond.  A final section of “General Observations” starts with Shelley’s reminder that “War is the statesman’s game,” and the timely political observation that “Honour sits smiling at the sale of truth.”

Tom Mayo teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at Southern Methodist University and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas.