Warhorses: Poems (review)

A Pulitzer Prize winner for his volume of selected poems Neon Vernacular (1994), and now a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Yusef Komunyakaa is not, or no longer, a member of a “school” of poets. He emerged forcefully in the late 1980s as a chronicler of the Vietnam war and was customarily identified as one of a group of veterans—W. D. Earhart, Walt McDonald, and Bruce Weigl, among others—who carried forward the conventions of war verse inherited from the soldier-poets of World War I. If one opens a popular textbook like The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, one finds mainly his classic recreations of the bloody conflict in Southeast Asia: “Tu Do Street,” “Starlight Scope Myopia,” and “Prisoners,” as well as postwar retrospectives like “Facing It,” arguably his signature poem and one of the most deeply felt and strikingly expressed of the post-Vietnam era. In an undergraduate survey course in contemporary poetry, these texts, along with two or three of his poems about jazz, are likely to form the defining niche into which Komunyakaa is fitted.

These early poems belong to the so-called “poetry of experience.” They are dramatic lyrics, usually presenting an episode in first-person, as these opening gambits indicate:

Thanks for the tree between me & a sniper’s bullet. I don’t know what made the grass sway seconds before the Viet Cong raised his soundless rifle.

(“Thanks,” Pleasure Dome 221)

I slapped him a third time. The song caught in his throat for a second. . .

(“Nude Pictures,” Pleasure Dome 206)

I counted trip flares the first night at Cam Ranh Bay, & the molten whistle of a rocket made me sing her name into my hands.

(“Combat Pay for Jody,” Pleasure Dome 225)

But in his most recent volumes, Komunyakaa has written with the determined goal of breaking free from the poetry of witness. He has tapped into the collective unconscious of humankind and speaks in the manner of an oracle, or a cultural historian. Here are some opening lines from Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000):

Sun. Moon. Hermes & Aphrodite embrace, as a Dali Figure reflects a cursed body Of water where Salmacis trapped

Hermaphroditus.

(“Hermaphrodite” 14)

Like Rimbaud in Ethiopia, He slips on doeskin gloves Before his hands touch trigger housings. Cold steel burns Cosmoline & cerecloth

As if to ignite the gunpowder In his genes.

(“In the Blood” 91)

Ariosto, I’m mad.

(“Complicity” 61)

Despite the solemnity and intended profundity of the mythic and literary references, I sense a tongue-in-cheek tone to these highly allusive poems, a scent of parody of modernist practice. Komunyakaa is self-consciously amplifying his thematic range, raiding the encyclopedias to distinguish his rhetorical strategies from the millions of poets who, like himself in the 1980s, depended on a reportorial method and the enticement of narrative to involve the reader. But he communicates, too, a country boy’s suspicion of high culture’s immemorial scriptures.

His subsequent book, Taboo (2004), continued to tack away from the pull of Vietnam, offering a sequence of poems in stepped tercets, of mostly three- and four-beat lines, that give voice to figures in history and literature. Allowing himself more space than the condensed, often occult or gnomic, quatrains of the previous book, Komunyakaa fills in the public record, the record of historical consciousness, of the African presence in America and Europe. Du Bois is his acknowledged guide, his Virgil figure, in this visit to the locations of black glory and black humiliation. Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes lord it over their white admirers, but in a wholly successful dramatic monologue. Tobe, the manservant of Emily Grierson in Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily,” tells a different story about the grand dame of that Mississippi estate, so often interpreted as The Old South. In such inventions the prosody is loose, the diction vernacular, the method a limpid exposition, as in a poem about another poet with an interest in racial themes:

As if the night    on Fire Island        never happened—the...