From Kirkus Reviews
Princeton writing professor, Pulitzer winner, and the author of nine previous books, Komunyakaa writes like a man possessedby art, music, memory, and by passions that transcend the resentment politics implied in this volumes title. As much as he records those from the lost cultures thieved by the WestAmerican Indians, Australian aborigines, African slaves, Vietnamese nativesKomunyakaa is more than a witness to history. His cinematic poems jump-cut through time, teasing out the larger truths of rage and beatitude in hard-boiled imagery of weapons and tools. His democratic vistas encompass not just like- minded poetsWhitman, Pavese, Langston Hughesbut the blood-beat of the given world. Komunyakaa discovers the forms necessary for his differing moods and subjects: Tumbling verse traces the palimpsests of Count Basie (Balance) and of an antique Smoothing Iron; the last survivor of an Indian tribe earns his quatrains (Quatrains for Ishi); Vietnam flashbacks require a prose phantasmagoria; and, his masterful sequence on Charlie Parker (Testimony) is a virtuoso jam of gorgeous sounds. Alliterative joy comes with Blessing the Animals; sex pumps up the heartbeats in Rhythm Method; and a dirty blues sequence wails the No-Good Blues. This ample volume, with its tough wit and bop frenzy, is recent American poetry at its visionary best. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
“What is most gratifying about Komunyakaa's [poems] . . . is their power to convince us that the individual imagination is more than equal to the most excruciating historical burden.” —New Yorker
“Komunyakaa is a poet of the human heart, in all its joys and horrors, fiercely present as it pounds awy at the center of every human being's consciousness. He enlarges our idea of what poetry is, challenging us to go beyond our own narrow definitions . . . Buy it now, find your own peaceful corner of our shared and imperfect paradise, and prepare yourself to be robbed of all you thought you knew, to experience criminal bliss.” —Washington Post Book World
“Komunyakaa's heroic attempt to reconcile so many different cultural manifestations, tendencies, and influences reveals nothing short of a desire to heal, through both confrontation and empathy, the wounds of history.”—American Book Review
“In this first collection since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems (1994), Komunyakaa brings his lush, propulsive, myth-making language to a wide range of subjects: Charlie Parker and Ishi; the California Indian; the wildlife of Australia and South Africa.... Here, as in the work of kindred spirits the Beats, a deliberately raw poetry is fruitfully thrown in with the cooked. The resulting vision of paradise -- 'the same feeling that drives/ sap through mango leaves,/ up into the fruit's sweet/ flesh & stony pit' -- is a compelling one.”—Publishers Weekly
From the Publisher
6 x 9 trim. LC 97-40294
About the Author
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA is Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. Wesleyan has published five of his nine previous books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular (1993), which also won the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award from the Claremont Graduate School, Magic City (1992), and Dien Cai Dau (1988). In 1991, he won the Thomas Forcade Award, in 1993 he was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry, and in 1997 he was awarded the Hanes Poetry Prize.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA is a professor in the creative writing department at New York University. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and many other awards for poetic achievement, including the 2001 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2004 Shelley Memorial Award, the Hanes Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
From The Washington Post
Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet of the human heart, in all its joys and horrors, fiercely present as it pounds away at the center of every human being's consciousness. He enlarges our idea of what poetry is, challenging us to go beyond our own narrow definitions. Though the longer sequences of poems offered in this new volume at times seem more engaged with the problems of sustaining a narrative in verse than with the pleasures and failures of empathy he elsewhere so brilliantly takes on, such a minor shortcoming should prevent no one from reading and relishing this wonderful book.
