When Dante the pilgrim travels through the circles of Hell in the Inferno, he often stops to lament the sufferings of the damned, frequently to the consternation of his pagan guide, Virgil. He cries after he hears of Francesca's punishment when she succumbed to her "great desire" for Paolo, and when Virgil urges Dante to question Pier delle Vigne about his suicide in canto 13, Dante responds: "I cannot, such pity fills my heart."

Of course, Dante's pity is not always laudable. One thing he learns as he descends toward Hell's frozen floor is to express righteous disdain for the sacrilege of erring souls. In this sense, Dante's pity of the damned is a form of identification that leads to salvation. He first laments, then disdains, his own sins in the sins of the damned as he moves toward a final identification with Christ's death and resurrection in the Paradiso.

Like Dante's Inferno, Eleanor Wilner's new book of poems, Tourist in Hell, is a political and theological work full of damned souls. Wilner's souls, however, do not reside in Hell but in the past—albeit the very recent past. The title of the volume was inspired by Hayden Carruth's poem "Tartar," in which we have the line, "What do you think hell is if it isn't history?" History, in other words, is the abode of the tyrants and murderers of the world. The problem for Wilner is that prose history transforms flesh and blood individuals into "the numberless, anonymous dead … / till the atrocious becomes / the mundane." Poetry, however, breathes life (or death in all its bloody gore) into them. Following Sidney's famous definition of poetry as "notable images of virtues, vice, and what else," Wilner's book provides us, or so she claims, with concrete, individual instances of "the atrocious."

And Wilner, in fact, can do this when she chooses. She is a master of imagery and extended metaphor, as she shows on a number of occasions in this volume. Unfortunately, she allows her bitter resentment regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American capitalism, and what she perceives as a self-serving form of cultural Christianity to overrun this poetic impulse and gift.

The first half of the book is devoted to the America of the past ten years. If history is Hell, contemporary American history, for Wilner, is clearly found in its innermost ring. In "Establishment," for example, a poem in the second section of the book dedicated to "The Bush/Cheney Years," she intones with calm, self-righteous disdain, that Death has occupied the White House:

Death had established himself in the Red Room,
the White House having become his natural
abode: chalk-white façade, pillars like the bones
of extinct empires, armed men crawling its halls
or looking down, with suspicion, from its roof

Death, it turns out, has been invited to the White House by his friends, who, as boys, had "wet dreams" of absolute power. Death seduces them with this illusion as they rain down bombs on unsuspecting villages and "children playing in the rubble." (I can imagine a small audience in a university coffee shop, smiling contentedly at this hateful touché.) In another of several Bush poems, "Cold Dawn of the Day When Bush Was Elected for a Second Term," Wilner bemoans the "blizzard of ignorance" as Americans vote President Bush into office and "the big price" so many will pay for this ignorance. This is the careless hyperbole of talk radio, and like talk radio, it grates on the nerves.

For her part, Wilner affects childlike innocence. In "Back Then, We Called It 'The War,' " she claims not to understand war at all:

And though, since that time, I have read many books,
have followed the smoke trail of countless thoughts
rising from the burning libraries;
though I have inquired in the ruins of many cities,
in the writing on the fallen walls,
in the blank stares of skulls in the killing fields,
in places hidden and open;
nevertheless, I do not understand.

No doubt evil is irrational, but not all force is evil, nor are all wars incomprehensible. Surely this is not impossible to understand.

Evangelicals and Catholics alike will find themselves consigned to Wilner's Hell. In "After the Tsunami," Wilner mocks the Christian belief in the apocalypse as escapism, and in "Magnificat," she likens Mary's nurturing of a hungry, gigantic Christ to the later nurturing of the giant of capitalism, "who sows darkness like a desert storm, / who blows like a wind through the Boardrooms, / who touches the hills, and they smoke."

Here, Wilner places herself in the line of Robert Frost, among others, a poet of reality who sees such beliefs as delusional and harmful. Yet, unlike Frost, she admits that we are unable to entirely escape them. What is needed is a revision of the myths that the imagination has created. These new myths, then, will function to free individuals from the oppressive constraints of ideology. Such is the focus of poems like "The Raven's Text," which tells the story of the raven after the flood—she didn't return to the ark, by the way, because unlike the "docile dove" who served the ark with its "bloated, discarded / carcasses," she gloried in the beauty of the recovering Earth—and a series of poems in the third section on the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. But if the old myths imprisoned, how will the new, revised myths not do exactly the same? Is Wilner, unlike previous poets, somehow above ideology? At times she seems (blissfully) unaware of his problem.

The best poems in Tourist in Hell are from the fourth and final section, where Wilner has a number of touching poems on love and death that finally allow her to escape the slightly elevated, self-righteous tone that overwhelms much of the book. Her agile meditations on Shakespeare's sonnets are full of what Hopkins called the "smudge" of humanity. In "Meditation on Lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 73," she remembers the loss of a friend as she reads her friend's poems, contemplating poetry's capacity to offer a second life to a deceased poet in "yellow leaves" only. And in "The Palest Flowers / Ash Snow … ," she contrasts a hibernating bear, sleeping beneath the "flowers" of "perfected cold," with "the cold world above":

backs bending, curses,
the scraping of shovels—
that softness,
its terrible weight.

A compassion for the fragility of human nature, which is so strikingly absent in the rest of the volume, finally comes to the fore. Unfortunately, it is too little, too late.

This lack of compassion is the great temptation and most common error in the recent political turn in American poetry. All good art is relevant to public life, but all too often in this apocalyptic, political poetry, the poet, unlike Dante in the Inferno, assumes the role of guide and prophet, not pilgrim, removing herself from the damned masses in a tacit denial of shared humanity. The poet really is a "tourist," a mere visitor to, not participant in the Hell of history—and like some tourists, unfortunately, quite happy to damn the locals to Hell as she rushes home at 36,000 feet.

Micah Mattix is assistant professor of literature at Houston Baptist University and the book review editor for The City. His book Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying "I" was just published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.