Neon Vernacular left me stunned. It won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1994 and the genius of the poet is evident throughout the book. I personally related to so much of his subject material. I was a college student in the late 1960s and part of the anti-war movement, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). I had friends killed in View Nam. I have seen the permanent damage this war has left on so many of the youth of my generation. It continues to be heartbreaking to this day.
"He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him"
Komunyakaa’s work covers a broad landscape. He sits in the jungles and cities of Viet Nam, twirls back to two women talking in a kitchen, a musical chat between neighbors, to transforming himself into a young girl, abused and raped repeatedly and indifferently by her father -- “Stepfather: A Girl’s Song” (p. 45). This breadth is astonishing. How does he get these settings, the feelings, so wildly divergent, so right? His poetic voice roams through musical blues and jazz expressions, “Copacetic Mingus” (p. 72) or “Untitled Blues” (p. 64); stark and vital statements of fact, as seen in “April Fools’ Day (p. 62), or “Monsoon Season (p. 130); some are epic in nature, “A Good Memory” (pp. 14-44); others present themselves as newspaper columns, “Changes; or, Reveries at a Window Overlooking a Country Road with Two Women Talking the Blues in the Kitchen” (p. 8-10). He make a grim monolog in “A Break From the Bush” (p.146), compelling in its blinding darkness. A eulogy for the not-yet-dead.
His words are delicious (“Praising Dark Palaces” p. 13”): “Once I found a scorpion/Crimson as a hibernating crawfish/as if a rainbow edged underneath.” Haunting (“Unnatural State of the Unicorn” p. 87) “Inside my skin,/loving you, I am this space/my body believes in.” Exquisite (“The Thorn Merchant’s Wife” p. 99) “how memories drift/ & nod like belladonna/kissing the ground.”
Often his poems are like being in an acid dream, hallucinogenic and wild, multi-layered, multi-colored, rants and tirades all screaming in an unknown language. I just find his poems so compelling, dark and mysterious. I love the ambiguities which abound throughout his work. The startling contrasts, like a bucket of cold water in the face, reach up with studied precision to adhere to my skin. I cannot get some of his words out of my mind:
God, this mud. Fear’s habit.
This red-caped dusk.
The iron bird rattles
overhead again, with stars
falling, the green man
strapped in its smoky doorhole.
Shooting up, away from my holler,
sparrow’s eclipse. “Water Buffalo” p. 131
The imagery over-whelms me. It is so intense and unexpected. What a treasure of a book. Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
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