Customer Reviews

Magic City (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

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Komunyakaa, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Neon Vernacular, here writes about his childhood in a Louisiana town. The poems are poignant but unsentimental: the child's world has a certain kind of innocence but is saturated with violence, from the Klan to his father's abuse of his mother to the pragmatic violence of slaughtering a hog. One of the more exciting elements of this book is Komunyakaa's skill in combining realistic description with startling and even puzzlingly abstract language.

Magic City remains, perhaps, my favorite volume out of Yusef Komunyakaa's distinguished body of work. With his characteristic blues and jazz-inflected lyricism, Komunyakaa revisits the harrowing violence and racism of the deep south as viewed through a piercingly translucent prism of personal memory. The poems making up this volume are in many respects a poetry of witness, and the eyes through which which this gritty psychic landscape is revealed to the reader penetrate various scenes of troubled family life, poverty, violence and racism with a razor-sharp clarity rife with anger, sorrow, and beauty. Ranging in age from childhood to young adulthood, the speakers, or witnesses, in these poems see through eyes that are simultaneously innocent and jaded, naive and urbane, unflinchingly tough and lyrically sensitive. These are unforgettable poems. Like good blues, they cut right down to the bone.