[Cardenal's] first major work, Hora 0 (Zero Hour), and Epigrams, emerge from the 'tropical nights of Central America', an atmosphere thick with dictators, misery and injustice. His anger and his reasons for it are comparable with Neruda's in Canto general. But his satire has, precisely, an epigrammatic quality and relies less on exposed feelings than on an exposing intelligence, as in his lines on the dictator of Nicaragua: 'Somoza unveils the statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium'. Similarly, instead of launching into invective, he documents his subject with the appearance of painstaking accuracy. The detail of occurrence in his hands acquires an absurd yet undeniable certainty…. (p. 174)

Cardenal learned to focus on his subject … largely through his deep knowledge of poetry in English, especially Pound's. The detailed and exterior language of the Cantos is unmistakable in Hora 0, down to such precise techniques as quoting from magazines like Time. (In fact his critics have complained that his verse reads like a translation from English.) (p. 175)

Cardenal's great strength is to have allowed 'facts' of the exterior world to speak for themselves while preserving a firm centre from which to arrange them. In these more recent works the first person is in fact not often formally expressed, is sooner implicit, and powerfully so, in the whole configuration of the poem…. [In his Homage to the American Indians] he will occasionally interpret their being favourably in terms of his own faith [Catholicism], incorporating them as it were into his universe on slight 'evidence'…. But this rarely seems forced in a given poem because of his talent for creating a space in which statements, from diverse sources, are cumulative and not pre-emptive…. To make his American credo more immediate, Neruda re-shaped history and geography, placed himself in them as the voice that invokes, censures and extols…. By convincing us of the 'objective' truth of his immense erudition, the corollary of his faith, Cardenal fuses experience yet more thoroughly and strives for a specifically prophetic tone. This is especially evident in the poems which draw on the Maya prophecies, or katuns, which refer to both past and future from some further point; and in his verses on the death of Merton, perhaps his most fulsome profession of understanding of life and the world. (pp. 175-76)

Among his contemporaries Cardenal is exceptional not just for having a faith of such intensity but for expressing it in terms that are politically so exuberant and accessible. (p. 177)