[Flamm is an American journalist. In the following excerpt, he characterizes I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head as "fierce yet mysterious," though he also notes some "poetic posturing."]

Yusef Komunyakaa's first book of poems was called Copacetic, a description it lived up to with its street-rhythmic, impromptu style. His new collection, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (the book is better than the title), continues his explorations of local history, private experience and the charged, semi-surreal language that can dig out the difficult truths in either one. Mr. Komunyakaa works intuitively, with an intense distrust of any sort of conventional knowledge. "The audacity of the lower gods—/ whatever we name we own," he says.

      I'd rather let the flowers
      keep doing what they do best.
      Unblessing each petal,
      letting go a year's worth of white
      death notes, busily unnaming themselves.

Born and raised in Bogalusa, La., Mr. Komunyakaa in his poems is pain's constant witness, often speaking for the historically dispossessed, but with the assumption that he does so only on his own idiosyncratic terms. Truthfulness is the supreme virtue in his world; lying, like the touch-up man "airbrushing away the corpses," is the worst evil. But since Mr. Komunyakaa deliberately chooses instinct over reason as his guide, the path to reality can be as lush, thick and hard to fathom as the backwoods. In "How I See Things" (a poem in which Mr. Komunyakaa does not apologize for the eyes in his head), he reminds a former freedom marcher about the civil rights days, the poet's impressions having an eerie feel to them. "Negatives of nightriders / develop in the brain," he says. Ghosts haunt the landscape, injustice continues—all you have to do is look:

       You're home in New York.
       I'm back here in Bogalusa
       with one foot in pinewoods.
       The mockingbird's blue note
       sounds to me like please,
 
       please. A beaten song
       threaded through the skull
       by cross hairs.
       Black hands still turn blood red
       working the strawberry fields.

That is Mr. Komunyakaa at his best—fierce yet mysterious. But the poems are not always so clear, and sometimes their obscurity seems no more than hip poetic posturing:

       Like some lost part of a model kit
       for Sir Dogma's cracked armor
       an armadillo merges with night.

Fortunately, Mr. Komunyakaa is more often worth the effort he requires.