Yusef Komunyakaa, Talking Dirty to the Gods
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
ISBN: 0-374-27255-7
Hardcover price: $23.00

usef Komunyakaa is our poet of paradoxes. Alternatively street-wise yet academic, folkloric yet urbane, detached yet innerving, backwoods yet classical, his poetry displays the richest kind of cultural cross-fertilization that exemplifies what it means to live in our era.

Images, references, allusions, and metaphors dart from one world to another and from one time period into another in Komunyakaa's work. Amazingly, everything fits in his vast sensibility. This heady mix is not just empty information combined into meaningless multi-cultural stew, but filtered into evocative poetry by taking a unifying plunge into the depths of the poet's unconscious then forged into art.

Reading Komanyakaa's best work is like reading the synapses of the world's psyche being sung by an enchanting siren. In his 11th collection, Talking Dirty to the Gods, he remains king of "Praising Dark Places," to take a title and theme from a poem in his previous Pulitzer Prize and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winning collection, Neon Vernacular.

In Talking Dirty to the Gods, Komunyakaa wrestles with taboos, the great liberators—incest, the seven deadly sins, death, sex, and more—in his most formal poetic offering yet. The 132 poems are sonnet-like four quatrain poems (as close to a sonnet sequence, at least, as Berryman's Dream Songs), which serve as a culminating meditation on life, death, sex, desire, and the roots of human grief and joy.

Taken together, this volume is a collision where high-born classical and theological references parade on Bourbon Street with all the showmanship and coquetry of a pageant-winning drag queen. This clash reminds readers that the sacred arrives uncensored, existing in the most baffling profane situations. Take the seeming innocent sport of fishing for a representative example. In the first six lines of Komunyakaa's "The Lure," the poet explores the sexy shadow of fishing in luscious detail:

The batfish hides there
At the bottom of desire.
A fleshy, wormlike lure
Dangles freely, luminescent

As a French tickler or line
From a love song personified.

The lake, in the poet's hand, transforms into a watery bed of desire where mythical creatures (the batfish) lurk like subliminal passions. The lure offers an allure that radically changes the predator, being irresistible beyond sense. The poet infers that we do not pick our pleasures (manifested in the sex toy or the romance of the song and singer coming alive), but rather they attract us.

In the next few lines, the poet mixes Gnostic notions of the archetypal blending of the sexes with literary and biblical metaphors. This incredible, imaginative leap takes a sharp turn, but never loses the reader. One of the Komnuyakka's great skills is that he can throw in competing images that ring with metaphysical suggestions while staying rooted to the narrative, worldly setting of the material: "Without eyes or guts, the male/Grows into the female, a Jonah/Inside a scaled-down Moby Dick."

The lure gets bitten in half. The poem then ends in a paradoxical celebration; the wounded healer turns painfully wise on this earthly yet sublime stage: "In a holy world of mouths/Speaking watery reprieves/In needful hush, down where/His first breath was an open wound." All the poetry in this collection resonates with such intensity.

For the sake of providing an example of the wonder at work in this volume, I'll offer an entire poem. This meditation on mortality and the afterlife also serves as pointed social commentary, which suggests insects will inherit the earth. I predict the piece will find an honored and anthologized home in the American Canon along with the poet's seminal Vietnam and jazz-inspired poems.

Ode to the Maggot

Brother of the blowfly
& godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork

& flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus, Christ, you're merciless

With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar's tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.

No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.

Unless your taste in contemporary poetry slants toward a certain aesthetic camp that wont allow you to read anything outside of narrow parameters, Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty to the Gods will amaze, delight, frighten, challenge, and enlighten you as only fine art can.

In the collection the poet chases our shared ideological shadows, works them into taut verses until they turn to light. In a culture often paralyzed by soberly accessing its dark side, this volume of poetry proves that it's not only a healing experience to visit the underground of experience, but that the necessary journey may restore us to ourselves and the world. Didn't the Greeks have a similar view of the role of art pointing toward the most sublime heights? As in the great epics of the world, the most vital and sustaining lessons occur, however, while making sense of the fertile darkness. Komunyakaa, in this collection, emerges from the quest an even better poet than before, perhaps our best.

© Michael Graber