Daisy Zamora describes how she was packing her rucksack as the only female member of a Sandinista battalion during the Nicaraguan revolution of 1979, writes Lorna Siggins

Most of the space was taken up by medicine for her fellow combatants. She was faced with a dilemma. If she took food, there would be no room for her poetry. She took the poetry and left the food behind. "I felt that if I died, someone would find the poems and they would survive," she says. "As an artist, you are a witness and an actor in history. And because we all live in such dark times, where power has been taken over by people who despise life, we have an extreme responsibility to fight for life and for the world."

Zamora's poetry has been acclaimed for its feminist perspective. "The language of emotional injury" is how one critic has described her work, a taste of which she offered at Cúirt. In Ser Mujer (To Be A Woman) she defines womanhood as sacrificing one's body to the service of others, and in her pen portraits she writes of lost lives - that of the waitress, the seamstress, the wife who endured beatings and abuse until "at last she became a widow" and rediscovered herself briefly before her own passing.

There is personal tragedy, as in her account of losing a child at birth; she writes of her family and of her experience as a mother. And there is humour, as in Prescripción, which she introduced as a verse of advice to a friend. All sorts of medication would struggle to cure that horrible headache: the only remedy was to "leave your husband".

For her, the artist's role is clear: the personal is the political. It was what she grew up with, she explains, and the words of Latin American writers were what inspired her and her compatriots during their struggle. For Zamora, that included time during the revolution as director of programmes for Radio Sandino, the illegal station established by the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Zamora, who was appointed a minister for culture and executive director of the Nicaraguan Institute of Economic and Social Research after the Sandinistas came to power, having overthrown the dictator Anastasio Somoza, is a firm believer in the "prophetical nature of art".

It is a belief she had in common with Michael D Higgins, the Labour Party's foreign-affairs spokesman and her fellow poet, at the Cúirt debate on Friday night. Its theme, the responsibility of art, was inspired by a remark earlier this year by the Argentinian poet and playwright Ariel Dorfman. Is it possible, he asked, that the peace everybody proclaims as desirable is so elusive precisely because we are much better at imagining discord than at imagining harmony?

During the debate, chaired by Mark Little of RTÉ and also including Dorfman and the artist Shane Cullen, Zamora quoted a fellow Nicaraguan writer: a poem is "a lie that becomes a truth because of its purity". That purity is a key obligation of the artist, she said. Asked if she had killed anyone during the revolution, she said she had not. And she smiled, as if she had been reminded of something. "We said we were going to chase the Somozas with poems, and we did it. The first Somoza tyrant was killed by a poet."

That the Sandinista victory should have been undermined by the US has disappointed but not deterred her. "We all hope that we can witness big changes in our lifetime, but we have to recognise that small changes are significant. Perhaps this is how humanity evolves. We fought a clean fight, and we only fought because we had to. There were no terrorist acts. Nicaragua is still the safest country in Central America, though there is so much poverty, and people are using civil society to try and bring about change."

She was clearly disillusioned by the way power corrupted some of her colleagues in the front. The revolution has been dispersed, she said, but it has not died. People were tired when Violetta Chamorro, the US-backed candidate, was elected president in 1990, she says. Chamorro offered all the right characteristics. "She presented a motherly image, she was the widow of a martyr and her family had been divided by the war," says Zamora, who recounts a tragic story to illustrate the personal dimension to conflict. A close friend had to bury two people very dear to her on the same day: her partner and her brother, who fought on opposing sides of the conflict. There were hundreds of mourners at the partner's funeral, but her friend had to identify and bury the brother alone. Doors were closed as she walked down the street with his body. Zamora wipes away tears as she relives her friend's pain.

She is extremely disturbed by the situation in her home country now but says Nicaraguans were outraged by the support of their current president, Enrique Bolanos, for the US-led invasion of Iraq. "Every day there are protests at this decision, and it shows that the spirit of revolution is still alive."

Zamora has moved to the US to live with her husband, the poet, translator and Vietnam veteran George Evans. Both of them are fearless critics of US foreign policy - as brilliantly espoused at Cúirt by Evans in extracts from his work The New World. Both went to some lengths to avoid US airlines to get to Ireland from San Francisco. It was only a pity that the scheduling of their reading, at lunchtime on Saturday, prevented their message being heard by a wider audience.

Zamora remains an optimist, in spite of what she perceives as the complete devaluation of truth and language by the US media during the war against Iraq. "I never saw such an outpouring of opposition as I did through the Internet. That is one positive aspect to globalisation. People can use this technology to subvert what is going on." The US, she says, clearly needs a revolution now.

Daisy Zamora's most recent work, The Violent Foam: New And Selected Poems, is published by Curbstone Press