Talking Dirty to The Gods.

Talking Dirty to The Gods by Yusef Komunyakaa Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 2000, $23.00, ISBN 0-374-27255-7

In his latest collection of poetry Komunyakaa offers readers a complex series of ruminations on the expansive ecology of human life. In an awesome feat, he compresses each of the 132 poems into a four-quatrain form, threatening to impose a daunting rigidity upon the "dirty talk" the title promises. For the most part, however, the mystery and invention Komunyakaa admires in poetry survives because the volume is as ambitious in content as it is rigorous in form.

From maggot and dirt dauber to various manifestations of devil, demigod, beast and divinity, Komunyakaa explores the majesty of the worlds human beings inhabit, worrying the lines between modern and ancient Greek and Hindu mythologies in a celebration of the imagination. His efforts are most successful in poems like "Bedazzled," "Gluttony" and "Devilment"--studies of nature and the microcosms of the everyday. There, Komunyakaa's luminary imaginings disrupt the predictable closure inherent to the poems' quadrilateral form as he uses the suggestion of simile and the velocity of metaphor to explode meaning and captivate the reader with the juxtaposition of uncanny images.

Caught between "Hearsay" and "Heresy" readers eavesdrop upon the bard's authoritative meditations upon creatures ruled by appetite and instinct. Meanwhile, the intimacy and flippancy of "dirty talk" challenges the eminence of the gods, positioning readers beside them as Komunyakaa's rightful audience. Similarly, the tender euphony of Komunyakaa's indulgence in language challenges our normative sense of obscenity.

Talking Dirty is engaging, though at times more exacting than appealing. Initiated by the signature image of the phallus as battering ram, readers embark upon an epic journey through which Komunyakaa evokes the heretical power of the word.

Duriel E. Harris is poetry editor for Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Program for Writer's.