Word: komunyakaa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This metonymic technique serves Komunyakaa well, allowing him to provide fresh insight into the things that make up war. But it sometimes veers toward a laundry list or a museum description. The second section of the book, which deals with the implements of war, sometimes loses its momentum due to the weight of the nouns that are loaded upon it. Komunyakaa excels at unemotionally describing scenes and letting the reader draw his own associations from the poetry. However, in poems like “The Clay Army,” he doesn’t add anything beyond the basic...
...Komunyakaa is not only interested in the physical objects that make up war. The poems in the first section are as much about love as they are about battle. “For a woman to conceive in this place & time, / she must be in the arms of a warrior riding / down through the bloody ages,” he says in one of his earlier poems. The women in his poems both drive the war and have the mystical power to soothe and heal the wounds of battle. They are both an antidote and a cause...
Then, of course, there are the warhorses themselves. In the poem that lends the book its title, Komunyakaa speaks of them as mythic beings, created to be ridden into battle. Throughout the book, Komunyakaa suggests that there is some basic human force that drives man to war; the horses are just as old and just as essential to the task of killing. As such, horses are often referred to throughout the poems as a symbol of man’s own warlike drive: “Horses carried men to reed boats. / Horses carried the Lion-hearted / ...Horses carried...
While literary references ooze from Komunyakaa’s poems, they are surprisingly readable and unpretentious. Yet there is still a clear wall between the poet and the reader. As Komunyakaa once said, “Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It’s a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question...
This particular perspective on the art is especially evident in his third section: one long poem entitled “Autobiography of My Alter Ego.” “Autobiography” tells the story of a man, not unlike Komunyakaa, who has spent time in Vietnam. Unlike Komunyakaa, however, he never moved beyond working at his father’s bar, and the whole poem resembles the unfocused rant of a slightly destabilized veteran. Here, the urgency that was muted throughout the other sections becomes more apparent. Komunyakaa’s alter ego is angry and full...