Trees Became Torches : SELECTED POEMS

  "Rolfe's voice is one that many of us feared was buried forever.         . . . He stands in the forefront of an entire 'lost generation' of left-wing         writers who fused artistic craft with irrepressible political commitment."         -- Alan Wald, author of The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected         Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment       "[Rolfe's] Spanish Civil War poems may be the best written by an         American writer, and his McCarthy era poems brilliantly counteract the         often apolitical, rather socially aseptic poetry of their time."         -- Reginald Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly       The radical journalist and poet Edwin Rolfe wrote eloquently of the hardships         of the Great Depression, the experience of war, and McCarthy era witch-hunts.         More than fifty of his best poems--some beautifully lyrical and some devastatingly         satiric--are included in Trees Became Torches. Rolfe was widely         known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans         who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the         1936-39 civil war.