[In the following excerpt, Gwynn discusses Komunyakaa's focus on jazz, Vietnam, family, and Louisiana in Neon Vernacular.]

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet whose work I have known mostly through anthology pieces, one of which, the beautiful "Facing It," is the most poignant elegy that has been written about the Vietnam War. The "it," of course, is the Wall:

      A white vet's image floats
      closer to me, then his pale eyes
      look through mine. I'm a window.
      He's lost his right arm
      inside the stone. In the black mirror
      a woman's trying to erase names:
      No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

It is a pleasure to have Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems in hand, a collection that gathers together poems from small press publications with those of three of Komunyakaa's books from Wesleyan (work from his most recent collection, Magic City, is not included). In all, it's a mixed bag, with the best work the newest. Komunyakaa has written about jazz and edited an anthology of poems on the subject, but too often his own jazz poems, like this passage from "Elegy for Thelonious," consist of recitations of allusions that have little intrinsic interest:

      Crepuscule with Nelly
      plays inside the bowed head.
      "Dig the Man Ray of piano!"
      O Satisfaction
      hot fingers blur
      on those white rib keys.
      Coming on the Hudson.
      Monk's Dream.

When Komunyakaa is able to step back from the discographies and incorporate jazz-style riffs into his speech patterns, the effect is much more gratifying, as in "Unnatural State of the Unicorn," where he asks a lover to set aside his academic, poetic, and assorted other credentials and simply "Introduce me first as a man." Here, his superb ear is much in evidence:

       Before embossed limited editions,
       before fat artichoke hearts marinated
       in rich sauce & served with imported wines,
       before antics & Agnus Dei,
       before the stars in your eyes
       mean birth sign or Impression,
       I am a man.

Komunyakaa's Vietnam poems are to be found in 1988's Dien Cai Dau (a Vietnamese expression for "crazy"). He served as a correspondent during the conflict, and some of his descriptions of battle have an Ernie Pyle-like quality of compassion tinged with a journalist's unsparing eye for ironic detail:

       He danced with tall grass
       for a moment, like he was swaying
       with a woman. Our gun barrels
       glowed white-hot.
       When I got to him,
       a blue halo
       of flies had already claimed him.

The most recent work in Neon Vernacular focuses on the poet's hometown of Bogalusa, Louisiana, a subject that he heretofore has not explored. Though Wesleyan's jacket copy is quick to note that Bogalusa was "once a center of Klan activity and later a focus of Civil Rights efforts," Komunyakaa's themes are rites of passage, friendship, and family. True, "The whole town smells / Like the world's oldest anger," but its source is the chemical plants and paper mills, "the cloudy / Commerce of wheels, of chemicals / That turn workers into pulp." I particularly like "Immigrants," a section of a long poem made up of scenes of growing up, for its unusual racial perspective, how blacks viewed "Guissipie, Misako, / & Goldberg" and other exotic imports to the South:

       We showed them fishing holes
       & guitar licks. Wax pompadours
       Bristled like rooster combs,
       But we couldn't stop loving them
       Even after they sold us
       Rotting fruit & meat,
       With fingers pressed down
       On the scales.

Probably the most impressive new poem is the last, a long elegy for the poet's father, a laborer who worked hard at everything, even making his children's Easter egg hunts a challenge, "hiding the eggs / In gopher holes & underneath roots." Some of Komunyakaa's memories are not easy, recalling his combative father's "Wanting me to believe / I shouldn't have been born / With hands & feet / If I didn't do / Your kind of work." Others capture delicate spots of time:

       Sometimes you could be
       That man on a red bicycle,
       With me on the handlebars,
       Just rolling along a country road
       On the edge of July, honeysuckle
       Lit with mosquito hawks.

At the end of a man's life, with his "name & features half / X-ed out," the old resentments have to be set aside. What is left is a son's lingering respect for the strength that "steered us through the flowering / Dogwood like a thread of blood."