Customer Reviews

Talking Dirty to the Gods: Poems

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Where Baraka, as a nationalist poet, looked for new forms from Africa to escape the prejudiced West, Yusef K appropriates all of Western culture with aplomb, dealing with the slave societies of the Greek and Romans and their Gods as well as walking through the middle ages and talking about current times. His knowledge of ancient history is impressive. The poems work on many levels, like the poem "Racoons," which is about hunting these animals with dogs but also about, horribly, using the same techniques to hunt down runaway slaves in the slave south. No book I know deals so powerfully with the long history of large scale slavery in Western history.

I was looking forward to reading "Talking Dirty to the Gods" from the moment I first saw it mentioned in "Poets & Writers." I was slightly disappointed with the book, however. My understanding is this was a collection of poems which were written during Yusef's walks to his classes. Every one of the 131 poems is four stanzas of four lines each. Many focus on Greek mythology (keeping with the theme of the book.) It isn't that the work is hard to understand, but it is more ambiguous than "Magic City" and "Dien Cai Dau" in its imagery. Two poems, however, caught my eye as being two of the best I've ever read. "Bedazzled", and "Genet" are exceptionally beautiful and finely honed poems with strong images and an afterthought that makes the reader just say "wow". Unfortunately the entire book is not like this, as "Magic City", and "Dien Cai Dau" were for me. Overall this book is definately worth reading, but I would not spend the extra money to get the hardback, if I had it to do over again.

I picked it up at the book store and was flipping through it. Wow! Seemed to be a little more accessible than some of Komunyakaa's other work, but just as powerful if not more so.