From Publishers Weekly
Komunyakaa's bodily frankness, his appealingly clipped rhythms and his darting intelligence all remain on display in his 11th book of poetry, a serious but always entertaining tour de force. All the poems take the same external form: four unrhymed quatrains each, in syncopated four-beat lines. These four by four by four-or-so verbal performances stick together to form an oblique and psychologically intricate antihistory of the human world, from Homo erectus to MTV. The poems keep up particular interests in sculpture; craft objects, from thumbscrews to valentines; sex; insects; and classical and comparative mythography. Polyphemus the Cyclops, Godzilla the movie, a full bill of Greek gods and ancient personages, the Renaissance artist Pollaiuolo, Rodin, W.E.B. DuBois, the minor Modernist martyr Harry Crosby, and (as Komunyakaa's devotees might expect) a team of jazz musicians stand among the large cast of characters. The star of most poems, though, is Komunyakaa as commentator, bringing his off-kilter attitudes and his considerable experience to bear wherever his focus falls. He tells a centaur how "Unholy/ Need & desire divide the season,/ As you eat sugar from a nymph's palm,/ Before she mounts & rides you into a man." The Venus of Willendorf displays "two fat gladiolus bulbs," "a hunk of limestone/ Shaped into a blues singer." Bedazzled by clashing consonants, "The Ides of March" asks "Which oak rafter/ Did this wasp nest cling to?" One of Darwin's finches "prances like God's little/ Torquemada on the highest rotten branch." A folk healer explains "I can't think ugly/ Since I deal in cosmic stuff." And Komunyakaa's "Castrato" asks himself "how to stop women/ From crying when I open my mouth." Scattered throughout the work are seven poems about, or anyway named for, the seven deadly sins ("Sloth" turns out to describe the animal). Komunyakaa (Dien Cai Dau; Thieves of Paradise), who teaches at Princeton, garnered a Pulitzer Prize in 1994 with Neon Vernacular; since then he's managed to stay both hip and difficult, oblique in his meanings and populist in his sounds. His latest work, which finds him jumping from longtime publisher Wesleyan to FSG, may be some of his best, and most various: it certainly will keep his readers on their toes.Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Prize winner Komunyakaa attempts to filter a wide range of subjects through a single poetic form, lyric meditations built from four quatrains with individual lines of three to four stresses. Most showcase the wry, lightly acidic wit tinged with surrealism that has become his trademark, whether revealed in the monolog of a castrato ("I wish I knew how to stop women/ From crying when I open my mouth") or in the postmortem thoughts of Sylvia Plath ("I never wanted to be famous,/ But couldn't lift my head off/ The oven door"). Though ambitious, working in this constrained form over the course of 132 poems, creates pressure for terse resolution in the final quatrain, thus producing a number of stress fractures: poems that appear to end "in medias res" or that rush to hasty conclusions. The many Classical allusions and a relatively flat diction recall English editions of The Greek Anthology, and whether or not the effect is conscious, the poems often seem like translations: reserved, dispassionate, a little too careful. There are many virtues here, but they are best enjoyed in small doses.DFred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NYCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
