Taboo: the Wishbone Trilogy, Part One.Taboo: The Wishbone wishbone see furcula. Trilogy, Part One by Yusef Komunyakaa Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- ) is an eminent American poet who currently teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award (for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, September 2004 $20, ISBN ISBN abbr. International Standard Book Number ISBN International Standard Book Number ISBN n abbr (= International Standard Book Number) → ISBN m 0-374-29148-9 Expectations are high when a collection's title is as ambitious as Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One and the poet is Yusef Komunyakaa. Maybe too high. After the powerfully witty, passionate and well-crafted collection, Talking Dirty to the Gods, it may have just not been in the cards for an equally impressive collection to arise. Komunyakaa has long mined the racial. sexual and cultural divisions that connect and divide us, in the present day and throughout the past millennium. In Taboo, however, the poems come across like well-written mini-essays--the occasional horrific events brought to the fore to remind us of our long involvement as Africans in Europe and the Americas (before the Mayflower Mayflower, ship Mayflower, ship that in 1620 brought the Pilgrims from England to New England. She set out from Southampton in company with the Speedwell, folks). But more importantly, how our position as "Other" tainted and continues to taunt our sexuality to this day. The poems that transform this theme are the most personal: "Daddy Red" which briefly chronicles the violent world of his grandmother's second husband who "got a white man's job" Or the poem "Outside the Blue Nile Blue Nile, Arab. Al Bahr al Azraq, river, c.1,000 mi (1,600 km) long, the chief headstream of the Nile, rising in Lake Tana, NW Ethiopia, at an altitude of c.6,000 ft (1,800 m). " in which a local beggar's response to his proffered generosity elicits a sharp retort leading to a search for "Benedict the Moor Saint Benedict ("The Moor"; 1526 – April 4, 1589) was an Italian saint. He was born of Christopher and Diana Manasseri, Africans (Ethiopians) who were taken to San Fratello (also known as San Fradello or San Philadelphio ," who "made the sign of the cross / to win the blind sight. Here was a man who hid in a thicket from a crowd's joy. It is thrilling to see how this desire for deeper spirituality, redemption and grace suffuse suf·fuse tr.v. suf·fused, suf·fus·ing, suf·fus·es To spread through or over, as with liquid, color, or light: "The sky above the roof is suffused with deep colors" the poem even as it ironically ends with the beggar's spirited demands. It could be that Taboo is Komunyakaa's way of creating his own Inferno as the first part of a new kind of Divine Comedy Thus, his use of tercets and the focus on episodes of violence, violation, low comedy and missed connections (the lovers are damned, their children damned, the poet's word cursed) demonstrate a hellish world, though a world that could lead to redemption can be glimpsed. Those few poems that rise above the dull take on 20th-century cultural icons or horrific historical events or racist fictions, and are few and far between. Patricia Spears Jones is a Brooklyn--based poet and playwright and the author of The Weather That Kills. |
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