Thieves of Paradise.

In his first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, Yusef Komunyakaa shows no signs of resting on his laurels. These complex and richly detailed poems cover a tremendous emotional range, from the joy of childhood memories ("Mumble Peg") to the devastation of a runaway slave who chooses to murder her child rather than allow him to be recaptured ("Modern Medea"). But the entire collection is unified by Komunyakaa's compassion for all who have been robbed by the "thieves of paradise." The reproduction of Benjamin West's painting Penn's Treaty With the Indians on the dust jacket suggests one specific way to read the book's title, but other thefts are chronicled here also: soldiers robbed by war, cultures robbed by colonizers, nature robbed by poachers.

Komunyakaa has always placed his highly personal poems in specific social and historical contexts. As a result, his work is simultaneously intimate and universal. "You need to have both," Komunyakaa once told an interviewer, "the odyssey outward as well as inward, to have any kind of constructive, informative bridges to vision and expression." In earlier collections--most notably Dien Cai Dau, about his experiences in the Vietnam War, and Magic City, about growing up in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Bogalusa, Louisiana--Komunyakaa's autobiography was in the forefront, and history functioned as backdrop. In Thieves of Paradise, the balance has tipped somewhat; many of these poems are meditations on historical events with a dash of the personal, rather than vice versa.

"Quatrains for Ishi," for example, is a long poem addressed to the last full-blooded Yahi Indian, who was captured in California in 1911 and held in captivity at San Francisco's Museum of Anthropology until his death five years later. Komunyakaa conjures the scene in vivid detail, and with great sympathy:

Back in your world of leaves,

you journey ten thousand miles

in a circle, hunted for years

inside the heart.

But the poet recognizes the danger in comparing Ishi's sorrow to his own: "I know if I think of you/as me, you'll disappear."

As is often the case with the poems of Michael S. Harper, Komunyakaa's near-contemporary (and fellow jazz fan), the abundant references to history, geography, and mythology in Thieves of Paradise can sometimes leave the reader feeling a bit at sea. When a poem like "Wet Nurse" begins with the lines

The shadow of a hilltop

halves an acropolis 

in the head of a serf's descendant.

Heimdall's horn

at the gates of Asgard

pulses beneath prayers

for wealth

I start wishing for footnotes. The numerous poems here about Aborigine culture and Australian colonial history are especially difficult in this respect. It took an afternoon in the library to learn that a "corroboree" is an Aborigine dance, that "First Fleet" refers to a group of English colonists that came to Australia in 1788, and that "witchety" is a plant whose roots harbor a grub the Aborigines use for food. I never did figure out what Wokanmagulli is.

One of Komunyakaa's greatest gifts as a poet is his edgy, jazzy sense of line, as is clear in this passage from "Testimony," a brilliant long poem about Charlie Parker:

Like a black cockatoo

clinging to a stormy branch

with its shiny head rocking

between paradise & hell,

that's how Yardbird 

listened. He'd go inside

a song with enough irony

to break the devil's heart.

Given this gift, I wouldn't have guessed that Komunyakaa would have much interest in writing prose poems. The fifteen included here, however, are among the strongest in the book. A number of these pieces are set in present-day Vietnam, where the war, stubbornly and tragically, refuses to recede into history. In "Buried Light," a farmer trips a land mine while planting rice:

Mud rises, arcing across the sun.

Some monolithic god has fallen

to his knees. Dead stars shower down.

It was there waiting more than

twenty years, some demonic egg speared

by the plowshare. Mangled legs

and arms dance in the muddy water till

a silence rolls over the paddie like

a mountain of white gauze.

At the end of Milton's Paradise Regained, a "fiery Globe of Angels" sings anthems to Christ, celebrating his victory over Satan, the "Thief of Paradise." In this collection, Komunyakaa reminds us of the many thieves of paradise that have gone unconquered.

But there is a hopefulness here, too. In "Anodyne," the last poem in the book, Komunyakaa celebrates his body--"I love how everything begs blood into song & prayer"--and suggests that through the power of those songs and prayers, paradise can perhaps be won back from the thieves:

I love this body, this

solo & ragtime jubilee

behind the left nipple,

because I know I was born

to wear out at least

one hundred angels.

Though sometimes difficult to grasp at first, these are vividly imagined and deeply intelligent poems. Komunyakaa is one of our finest poets, and in Thieves of Paradise, he is working at the height of his powers.

Joel Brouwer teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His chapbook of poems, "This Just In," was published in March by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Los Angeles.