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Yusef Komunyakaa

The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems Hardcover – October 6, 2015

by Yusef Komunyakaa (Author), Jeff Clark (Designer)

4.6 11 ratings

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Another brilliant collection from Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, who David Wojahn has called one of our "most significant and individual voices," The Emperor of Water Clocks delights, challenges, and satisfies.

"If I am not Ulysses, I am / his dear, ruthless half-brother." So announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks. But Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the beguiling guises Komunyakaa dons over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here he is with Napoleon, as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; here he is at the circus, observing as "The strong man presses six hundred pounds, / his muscles flexed for the woman / whose T-shirt says, these guns are loaded"; and here is just a man, placing "a few red anemones / & a sheaf of wheat" on Mahmoud Darwish's grave, reflecting on why "I'd rather die a poet / than a warrior."

Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and peregrinations there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected rhythms; his effortlessly surreal images; his celebration of natural beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the structures and struggles of power: not only of, say, king against jester but of man against his own desire and of the present against the pernicious influence of the past.

Print length

128 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date

October 6, 2015
Dimensions

5.71 x 0.61 x 8.37 inches
ISBN-10

0374147833
ISBN-13

978-0374147839
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Editorial Reviews

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Praise for Yusef Komunyakaa

“Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period's most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter and to the taut concision of his free verse . . . Dazzling.” ―David Wojahn, Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa

“Probably my favorite living poet. No one else taught me more about how important it was to think about how words make people feel. It's not enough for people to know something is true. They have to feel it's true.” ―Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times Style Magazine

Praise for Emperor of Water Clocks

“The Emperor of Water Clocks is very much a movement from reverie to reverie, and an impressive work of lyric wisdom as well.”―Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Monthly

About the Author

Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poems include Warhorses (FSG, 2008), Taboo (FSG, 2004), and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at New York University.

Jeff Clark was born in southern California in 1971. The author of three books of poems--The Little Door Slides Back, Arab Rab, and Sun on 6--he lives in Oakland.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition (October 6, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374147833
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374147839
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.71 x 0.61 x 8.37 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,253,789 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,644 in Black & African American Poetry (Books)

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4.6 11 ratings

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4.6 out of 5

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Helana

Awesome book.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 31, 2019

Verified Purchase

Good book of poetry. Arrived in perfect condition.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 1, 2015

Verified Purchase

Poetry that makes you think. Komunyakaa remains of the greatest poets of this century. The rythm flows.

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Andrew Tichy

Customer Review

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 31, 2017

In his latest book of poetry, The Emperor of Water Clocks, Yusef Komunyakaa departs from the central topic of the unspoken horrors of and personal experience in the Viet Nam War. Those collections, which gained immediate praise in the 1980s and 90s, included Dien Cai Dau in 1988 and the Pulitzer Prize winning Neon Vernacular in 1994. In Emperor, Komunyakaa travels the globe, from Venice to Egypt and Appalachia, never stalling for longer than a brief visit to a variety of characters, including actors, dancers and soldiers; he also includes many jazz legends within his poems, following a trend found in much of his work including the 1989 poem “February in Sydney.” However, modern-day figures make appearances in this work, including an entire poem about President Barack Obama. Yet through it all Komunyakaa remains steadfast in his rhythmic style, invoking clear jazz beats and an intriguing level of fantasy.

Emperor takes its place in a long line of critically acclaimed poetry penned by Komunyakaa and continues his dedication to the trends of the Contemporary Period, most notably in “a continuing exploration of music and other forms of vernacular culture as springboards for literary innovation and theoretical analysis” (NAAL 914). In Emperor, Komunyakaa echoes the likes of Langston Hughes and Michael S. Harper through his lyrical tone and pointed approach to topical, pressing issues, including gun control (“Rock Me, Mercy”) and police violence against unarmed black men (“Ghazal, After Ferguson”). In the former, Komunyakaa draws upon “a place where a certain kind of meditation can take place” (NAAL 1266). Exploring the moral challenges of modern life, Komunyakaa juxtaposes this serenity with a nation in mourning following the horrific school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut which left 20 children and six adults dead. Noting twice in the 15-line poem that “The river stones are listening,” he calls on hiding guardian angels to listen to a weeping nation as the “trees lean closer today” (27).

Less than two years later, Komunyakaa conjures Hip-Hop and Rap Artists to attempt an explanation of the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Lamenting the fact that “No, an attitude is not a suicide note/written on walls around the streets” and that “fear can kill a man on the streets,” Komunyakaa pleads for Biggie Smalls and Grandmaster Flash to “orate/what’s going on in the streets” (96). His repetition of “streets” as the conclusion of each couplet illicit the public bloodshed and hauntingly harken the erupting violence during the rise of the Black Arts Movement; he implores the reader to “Take back the night. Take killjoy’s/cameras & microphones to the streets” (96). Injustice and anger take center stage as he asks “Who will go out there & speak laws/of motion & relativity in the streets?” (97).

Using a “deceptively simple style,” Komunyakaa remains true to the form he’s crafted for forty years, contrasting deeply rooted references with social observations (NAAL 1277). Though Emperor crosses the borders of land and time, his words resonate with the same beauty and clarity.

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construct your own narrative

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 28, 2017

poetic and literary sleuths will delight in komunyakaa’s treasure trove, the booty is bountiful, so dive in and fill your hands.

starting from The Land of Cockaigne, where ‘A drowned kingdom rises at daybreak’, a modern-day ulysses, a reincarnation of melville’s pip, or a seeker of some lost world, take your pick, travels to faraway places. poems of strange lands and quasi-mythical individuals, the material of legends, of kings and emperors, mermaids and a Minotaur, of kings and emperors, even a president holding a book as the sojourner wonders if the book of poems by the island poet, derek walcott, is for president obama some sort of augury:

‘Was he looking for St. Lucia’s light
to touch his face those first days
in the official November snow and sleet…?’

our traveler is no stranger to portents, see Omens or an Augury at Sunset

instead of potentates, he pays tribute to the troubadours and singers. see the sketch on the book cover of richard lindner’s Division of Surfaces, how our voyager stops:

‘to place a few red anemones
and the sheaf of wheat on Darwish’s grave. …’

to write elegies for kiki dan in a hospice, and for michio ito. the artist, the poet, the singer, and the dancer.

the instruments of which he sings belong not to the ship’s navigator but to musician, the Krar, Ode to the Oud, and the four wind instruments in The Work of Orpheus.

not always by ship does he travel, though water is never far from any of these poems. when inland, there is ‘November snow and sleet’, and there is the water clock as part of a vision as obscure as a figure in the carpet or a face in the fog, which figures in whole and in part in several poems.

and through several poems when the way seems lost there are the two charting poems Longitudes and Latitudes, the latter a riddle of identity:

'If I am not Ulysses, I am
his dear, ruthless half brother …'

and when the occasion requires, the riddler is more diver than a sailor as in The Enchanted Diver and again Latitudes:

‘If I am
Ulysses, made of his words
and deeds, I swam with sea cows
and mermaids in a lost season,’

in the concluding poem, like ulysses he arrives home from his wanderings in a good season to a good place, Springtime in Atlantis.

a book of singular poems which can be assembled in a diversity of narratives. i suggest one. others are there. a rare selection for a reading group.

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