Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems.

What engages one right off is the quality of the language of Komunyakaa's poetry, a freshness marked by a delightful figurativeness and a wit that never cloys and which may be attributed in great part to the richness of the material from which it springs. Komunyakaa has drawn his material from American vernacular culture generally, but mostly from his African American heritage, the wellsprings of which are in his boyhood hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana, and nearby New Orleans. His style may be described as postmodernist American mainstream with an African American twist. It includes surrealistic and "language poetry" effects that sometimes engender poems that poise on the brink of nonreferentiality but that stand nevertheless as viable acts of language.

The poems included here are ones presumably written since the publication of Komunyakaa's previous book, Magic City (1992), and poems selected from that collection and the seven earlier ones published between 1977 and 1989. Their renderings reveal a consistency of voice and aesthetics that bespeaks the achievement of an early poetic maturity on Komunyakaa's part. They depict a persona who is as poised in his Americanness as in his African Americanness, and who makes creative capital out of the tension between the two. This generative tension informs the dynamic core of many of Komunyakaa's poems, whether he writes about his war experiences in Vietnam, including the effects of transplanted American racist attitudes there, or about life under more direct racially charged conditions in the U.S.A.

The most appealing of Komunyakaa's poems to me are those depicting events in the everyday lives of neighbors, friends, and family members in the poet's hometown of Bogalusa, once a KKK-infested area. Ethnic difference and its racist consequences are basic assumptions in these poems generally, which often concern themselves with the problems peculiar to this condition. But what seems to be of greater interest to Komunyakaa are the problems inherent in relational differences that are closer to home - those between lovers, between husbands and wives, between parents and children, between young and old, etc.

"Little Man Around the House," a relatively short poem about the poet's son and one that amply illustrates Komunyakaa's masterful poetic abilities as well as his interest in material from the domestic realm, examines parental conflict. Using deceptively simple strokes of allusiveness, the poet deftly reveals the complexity beneath the surface in his portrayal of the captivating boy. The dominant imagery in the poem comes from the African American experience and draws upon astronomical, animalistic, and African American musical and folk religious experiences:

You look up from your toy Telescope, with Satchmo's eyes, As if I'd put a horn to your lips. . . . You sit like the king of trumpet Between my grandmama & wife, Youngblood, a Cheshire cat Hoodooing two birds at once.

The strategies here are vintage Komunyakaa. The conceit involves a functional conflation of the telescope, of phallic thematic significance, as both astronomical and musical instrument, resulting in a conceptual fusion of "eyes" and "lips" as organic devices of transfixion and entrapment. The central allusion is to the charming Louis Armstrong performance, Satch's "hoodooing" of his predominately white audiences through the clever use of his mouth and eyes in working the crowd. In alluding to this hallmark Armstrongian performance strategy, Komunyakaa subtextually evokes the issue of the renowned showman's use of devices that are controversially associated with stereotypes in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century white blackface minstrelsy. We are thus called upon to construe the incidents in the poem in the larger context of U.S. race relations.

At any rate, we sense that the boy, our archetypal African American "Youngblood," has cleverly aligned himself with the domestic powers that be, the women of the household, just in case. The father's gift of a telescope has been gently yet no less subversively transfigured by the son's largely unwitting machinations into an instrument of parental manipulation.

"Little Man" may be construed intertextually with "Songs for My Father," an earlier, much longer poem that traces the stormy relationship the poet has had with his own father. That this relationship is charged with potential violence is revealed in the phallically charged image of father and son suggestively squaring off while actually at work sinking a well, driving an elongated object into the ground:

We stood on a wooden platform Facing each other with sledge hammers A copper-tipped sieve sunken into the ground Like a spear. . . .

The potential for violence is rendered less figuratively later in the poem, in the son's determination to defend his mother against his father's physical abuses:

Goddamn you. Goddamn you. If you hit her again, I'll sail through That house like a dustdevil. (29)

As we turn from the domestic mise-en-scene, we find exemplified in the poem "Ambush" Komunyakaa's skill in depicting a Vietnam combat situation. It begins:

So quiet birds start singing again. Lizards bring a touch of light The squad leader counts bullets a third time. Stars glint off gunbarrels.

Intimations of peace inhere in the quietness that initiates the singing of the birds, and in the "touch of light." The word Lizards, however, begins a degenerative process, undermining these images of potential accord as the process segues into a juxtaposition of natural elements and manufactured objects of war, a typical Komunyakaaian strategy for highlighting war as the abberational human undertaking it is: lizards and bullets, stars and gunbarrels. The illusory quietude of the opening is dispelled in the poem's closure, as the singing birds are transformed into figures of desperation and the imperiled combatants find themselves tellingly at

A crossroad for lost birds singing their hearts out calling to the dead, and then a sound that makes you jump in your sleep years later, the cough of a mortar tube. (129)

Even if we were not aware of Komunyakaa's African Americanness, we would tune into that essential aspect of him in his poetry just as we would to Zora Neale Hurston's in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Komunyakaa's poems, as in Hurston's novel, direct racial conflict is kept pretty much offstage, but as the cliche goes, it is all the more conspicuous by its relative absence. We know it is there but must not allow it to distract us from the more interesting and essential human dramas that are being offered in the poems. There are no images, in Toni Morrison's words, "of blinding whiteness," or of overwhelmed blackness; and this is not a matter of evasiveness but of artistic understatement from a poet who rarely misses and in whose work we experience the making of a major world poet, if he has not achieved that status already.(1)

Note

1. This prophetic sentence - like the rest of the review - was written prior to Komunyakaa's being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Neon Vernacular. [Ed.'s note]

Reviewed by

Alvin Aubert Wayne State University