Word: komunyakaa
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...there anything new to say about war? With the recent glut of books and films tackling the subject, one certainly has reason for posing the question. But “Warhorses,” the latest collection from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Vietnam veteran Yusef Komunyakaa, offers a nuanced take on the overwritten subject, addressing its great complexity with profound ambivalence and great dexterity...
...Komunyakaa doesn’t break any new ground with his descriptions of Vietnam or of what it is like to survive such a war, but he doesn’t have to, either; Komunyakaa is aiming for something much bigger. “Warhorses” doesn’t rehash the same stories or military clichés that generations of war movies have instilled in us. Instead, Komunyakaa turns to a smaller lens: the perspective of a particular character, or the different objects that constitute war. By boiling war down to its essence, Komunyakaa asks the reader...
...Warhorses” is divided into three sections. The first section, “Love in the Time of War,” is a series of poems written in loose sonnet form. Komunyakaa starts by evoking the savage war of primitive man (“An obsidian ax. A lion-skin drum”) and works his way through ancient war, through Gilgamesh, through Cain and Abel, through the visceral, bloody war of the past, to the darker and more terrifying present of torpedoes and secret wars...
...Komunyakaa writes plainly but with powerful imagery. He need only call up a few simple, well-placed nouns and his scene is clear. He takes this idea the furthest in a two-part poem that lists the things that divide man to show the consequences of these divisions. Each terse one-word phrase becomes packed with meaning, emphasizing the divided nature of the concepts they represent: “Grid / coordinates. Maps. Longitude. Latitude. Property lines drawn / in unconsecrated dust.” War is both a calculated affair deployed from a bunker and a personal conflict between two neighbors...
...could accuse Yusef Komunyakaa, 50, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and a tenured professor at Princeton, of writing self-indulgent, feel-good verse, and he shows why in Thieves of Paradise (Wesleyan University; 128 pages; $19.95). Raised in a particularly racist precinct of rural Louisiana, Komunyakaa, who is black, was drafted into the Vietnam War and assigned to write for the Southern Cross, a newspaper for infantrymen. Thirty years later, the artillery fire still echoes in his work. In "Ia Drang Valley," a slender, striking war poem both lyrical and blunt, a soldier dreams himself into...