BOOKS

...Caldicott suffered the first of many traumas at the age of eighteen months, when her parents left her in the care of a stranger for two weeks while they went off on a holiday...

...for the word 'revolution,' a door bolted in rust...

...She traveled the hustings as Mondale's surrogate, told audiences that human survival was at stake, swallowed her pride when he ignored her ideas, and suppressed her outrage when his running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, pledged publicly to press the nuclear button if necessary...

...Caldicott took on the Australian uranium-mining industry...

...They respect their readers, adhering to an aesthetic of clarity...

...Ouintana...

...a Vietnam \eleran, has perfected a kind of Chicano haiku in My Hair Turning Grux Among Strangers...

...The problem of impending nuclear war was to me an acute global clinical emergency...

...This conviction—uttered by a postman who embellishes his love letters with Pablo Neruda's poems in the mo\ ie The Postman—goes to the heart of a crisis of meaning haunting United States poetry...

...I was obliged unconsciously to choose the most powerful people I could find to rebel against, the leaders of governments...

...Next came nuclear power...

...he writes in "Father...

...She says the experience put an emotional wall around her and left her with a lifelong fear of abandonment...

...The eclipse became full a few years later when arms-limitation agreements, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War gave the appearance that a solution was at hand...

...now a pediatrician, journeyed with her husband Bill, a radiologist, to the United States, where he had received a research appointment at Harvard...

...Desperate, Caldicott turned to electoral politics in 1984, committing her great energy and prestige to the Presidential candidacy of Democrat Walter Mondale...

...I would learn, too, that "boycott" is not a boy's haircut, that I could sketch a picket line on the blank side of a leaflet...

...There-are 500 years of me back home...

...7h p.iges SsUli) Imagine the Angels of Bread by Martin Espada Norton, ll 15 pages...

...Caldicott writes...

...Caldicott soon found herself crisscrossing the country, speaking to tens of thousands, debating industry and government leaders on television...

...Under pressure from Physicians for Social Responsibility, Women Against Nuclear Danger (a kindred organization also founded by Caldicott), and the Nuclear Weapons Freeze, which won four state referendum elections in 1982, Congress passed a toothless Freeze resolution...

...These groups had grown strong on fears of nuclear oblivion, and they longed for a quick solution...

...his organizing and writing cost him years in various prisons on charges related to seditious conspiracy...

...Bv 1980 the Australian physician was doing American politics full time...

...In "Hands Without Irons Become Dragonflies," Espada writes: This is the law of poets and their newspapers: for the word 'weapons,' a cell with no toilet...

...I know I had no choice but to leave medicine in 1980 and follow a different path...

...She combs the newspaper with only chisme in mind, calls all over town, trades stories...

...The amalgamation seemed logical at the time, but it led to a smoldering conflict, culminating in open hostilites, with the conservative, male-dominated group that had founded the organization...

...People there now have different versions of the very gossip they were spreading eighteen years ago...

...Perhaps she feels the need, as others do, to justify her heavy payment of twenty-five years of unremitting commitment to a cause...

...Mixing self-criticism with self-praise in this personal and political memoir, Caldicott claims credit for having helped make the world a safer place: "As I look back, I can see that this desperate passion I exhibited was that of a mother who loved, and a pediatrician who cared for sick and dying children...

...And it continues in no small measure because ot false assurances uttered in ihese dangerous limes by those whose desperate passion has cooled.¦ The Other Side of the Tracks \h Hair Turning Gray Among Strangers b\ Lcru\ Ouinkinn Bilingual Press...

...By the end of 1982, it had attained a membership of 30,000 people, with 150 chapters in forty-eight states...

...government on charges related to smuggling refugees into the United States...

...The event marked the ascent of Helen Caldicott as the brightest star of the star-studded American peace movement of the 1980s...

...With slow book sales and poor attendance at readings...

...In "Mitotera...

...She was acquitted of these charges...

...In leading fellow doctors and other health professionals out of their clinics and laboratories to educate masses of people about the deadly effects of nuclear war, Caldicott ignited a force that came close to stopping the nuclear arms race at its height...

...By 1972 the French tests had been driven underground...

...Caldicott describes Reagan as "a nice old guy who was terribly uninformed...

...President Reagan gave Caldicott a seventy-five-minute audience, at the urging of his daughter, Patti Davis, but was unmoved by Caldicott's entreaties...

...This while ballistic-missile submarines still patrol the ocean depths with enough nuclear firepower to lay waste to continents, while nuclear arsenals are still numbered in the thousands, while nuclear weapons continue to spread from state to state, and while governments prepare new weapons-production systems for the next century...

...Now in her autobiography...

...While a few hardy perennials remain to do the work of nuclear disarmament (War Resisters League, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Plowshares movement—organizations receiving little or no mention in this book), most of those that blossomed so brilliantly in the 1980s have withered or turned away...

...The 1984 Presidential campaign disaster began to eclipse Caldicott as a major force in American politics...

...His brief poems capture the human landscape of New Mexico, his boyhood home...

...What makes Caldicott so blind to the threat that continues today despite the end of the Cold War...

...Poetry matters here, and Ouintana and Espada deliver...

...Spanish for gossip, mitote (or chisme) has roots in the concept of myth...

...The book ends with a tribute to Clemente Soto Velez...

...a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate student who later was to found the Nuclear Weapons Freeze, a broad-based 1980s movement that called on the United States and the Soviet Union to stop adding to their nuclear-weapons arsenals...

...no one is excluded...

...Even if she had not risen to international prominence, her story would still be a compelling one...

...Demetria Martinez (Demetria Martinez, based in Tucson, is the author of "MotherTongue...

...The answer depends on which side of the tracks you frequent...

...The elegance of Espada's and Quintana's poetry emanates from fidelity to their respective histories...

...But by misjudging her candidate, his party, and the electoral process itself, Caldicott may have betrayed the movement she mothered...

...A Desperate Passion, she provides a snapshot of the later years of the tumultuous Cold War peace movement and an intimate personal story...

...In "Returning," Quintana writes: It seems I have been gone from home much longer than I thought...

...Implicit in Espada's work is the conviction that the only thing worse than a rebel without a cause is a rebel without a community...

...Ouintana writes: E\en in that town whose business is finding out everybody else's business she is extiaordmarv...

...So, too, with Physicians for Social Responsibility, Women Against Nuclear Danger, the Freeze, and much of the rest of the peace movement...

...The great Puerto Rican poet spent his life struggling for the island's independence...

...Her case is the subject of one of Martin Espada's poems in his current book...

...While working as a journalist, she was indicted in 1987 by the U.S...

...His poems are about individuals, but they hang together as if on a rosary: bead by bead the reader contemplates a whole community, a culture...

...Aforly-year-old Australian sat down with a few friends in her Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment on an August day in 1978 to form a doctors' organization to help prevent nuclear war...

...Mitoteras and mitoteros, the town gossips, bind communities together by immortalizing their members...

...Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a bestseller depicting the effects of nuclear war on Australia, made a lasting impression on her as a teenager...

...Now that the nuclear threat is over, writes Caldicott from the comfort of the Australian home to which she retired in the early 1990s, the world can get on with other urgent problems such as environmental pollution, global wanning, and human overpopulation...

...Whatever the reason...

...Meanwhile, the nuclear threat has gone underground...

...for the word 'Yankee,' a window blindfolded with bars...

...They called it Physicians for Social Responsibility...

...The threat continues...

...lslN>>5 Poetrv is not for those who write it...

...Yet their visions are complex and iconoclastic...

...Medicine remains my vocation, however, and all mv political work since has been guided by the principles that guide the practice of medicine...

...After Mondale's landslide defeat, Caldicott lapsed into depression...

...Boning up on the biological effects of radiation...

...The climax came on June 12, 1982, when she and others addressed a crowd of one million at a peace rally in New York's Central Park...

...they blame poetry s difficulties on the sorry state of American culture...

...Bui she is (Jivadlulls wrong to claim that children can now expect a future live ot that threat...

...Or perhaps, for all her fervor and intensity, she approached the nuclear threat at too shallow a level, focusing too closely on the peril that strategic nuclear-weapons systems on hair-trigger alert posed to Western industrialized populations...

...A good student, she resolved early to become a doctor and won scholarships to medical school...

...She writes of attempting abortion, of extramarital affairs, of a brief lesbian relationship, of deep depression, of a near-death experience following hepatitis, of divorce, of suicidal thoughts—all these punctuated by ineluctable emotional highs born of extraordinary accomplishment and the adulation of millions...

...Born in 1938 to a loving father and emotionally distant mother in Melbourne...

...The poets call us to recognize our neighbors in every face, to embrace struggles we might otherwise believe are different from our own...

...the result is a universal vision...

...Because Mom and Dad were dead, and because they had exercised almost absolute power and control Samuel H. Day Jr., a Madison, Wisconsin, writer and peace activist, is a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board...

...Caldicott soon joined crusades against nuclear power in California and New Hampshire...

...Helen Caldicott justly deserves credit for awakening millions to the threat ol thermonuclear vaporization and challenging ihem to take remedial action...

...What is to be done, asks literary critic Dana Gtoia in a book titled...

...She felt betrayed by Mondale...

...In the early 1970s, the government of France began conducting nuclear-weapons tests in the Western Pacific atmosphere upwind from Australia...

...Caldicott joined the embryonic Australian anti-nuclear movement, wrote letters to the editor, made speeches, aniwenl on television...

...For days the boy is convinced that his father is dead, but then the elder Espada returns home: Not dead, though I would come to learn that sometimes Puerto Ricans die in jail, with bruises no one can explain/swelling their eyes shut...

...The easing of that particular symptom may have given this political physician the impression that the disease itself had run its course...

...In "The Sign of My Father's Hands," Espada recalls when his dad was jailed after picketing a beer company that refused to hire blacks or Puerto Ricans...

...for the words 'Puerto Rico,' a wall of cockroaches too fat to kill with a fist...

...In 1978 she took a crash course in nuclear weapons from Randall Forsberg...

...Too many poets, ensconced in academic towers of Babel, write tor learned elites...

...Caldicott is by no means alone in retiring too soon from the fray...

...Can Poetry Matter9 Essays on Poetrv and American Culture...

...In no way was I going to allow the incidence of genetic and malignant disease to increase amongst the world's children as a byproduct of nuclear technology, and I'm pleased that I played some small part in helping children to expect a future free from the terrifying prospect of thermonuclear vaporization...

...It is for those who need it...

...I was filled with the ferocity of a lioness protecting her cubs...

...When Caldicott and her friends selected the name Physicians for Social Responsibility, they were unaware that a Boston-area study group of the same name had actually been in existence since the early 1960s...

...Despite this, Physicians for Social Responsibility became a national force under her leadership...

...over my life...

...For Martin Espada, author of Imagine the Angels of Bread, "home" is where the struggle is, both historically and in the emotional landscape of the dissenter...

...In 1975 Caldicott...

...She failed to budge the government and union leadership, but she discovered she had a spellbinding style, especially when she spoke from the heart— as a doctor and mother—without notes...

...Caldicott links her ripening political awareness as a young woman to delayed adolescent rebellion...

...Poets such as Leroy Ouintana and Martin Espada are among ihose whose words are taking wing al community and literacy centers, rallies, prisons, shelters, bookstores in the barrio, and high schools in the 'hood...

...The\ cannot...

...nothing is secret: fires, arrests, affairs, murder...

...For Quin-tana, mythmaking is a living tradition that is ultimately more meaningful than celebrity...

...What needed to be done was to delineate the history of the nuclear arms race, to present a kind of clinical examination of the planet: the number of bombs and where they had metastasized: the pathology of a nuclear attack: the etiology, or cause, of this crisis, which involved human psychology: and the cure—a univerBOOKS sal commitment by the global community to abolish these weapons...