An old anger drips into my throat,
       & I try thinking something good,
       letting the precious bad
       settle to the salty bottom.
       Another scene keeps repeating itself:
       I emerge from the dark theatre,
       passing a woman who grabs her red purse
       & hugs it to her like a heart attack.

Most of Yusef Komunyakaa's poems rise to a crescendo, like that moment in songs one or two beats before the bridge, when everything is hooked-up, full-blown. Over the course of Komunyakaa's seven books, much has been made of the recurring themes in his work: autobiography, African American experience in the South and in Vietnam. Much has also been said about the music in his poetry, the song lyrics and musicians' names.

       Dexter Gordon's tenor sax
       plays "April in Paris"
       inside my head all the way back
       on the bus from Double Bay.
       Round Midnight, the 50's,
       cool cobblestone streets
       resound footsteps of Bebop
       musicians with whiskey-laced voices
       from a boundless dream in French.
       Bud, Prez, Webster, & the Hawk,
       their names run together riffs.

While many critics have remarked on the musical names (Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Leadbelly) that crop up in Komunyakaa's work and the work of other African American poets such as Cornelius Eady, they often regard these ghostly appearances as emblems or elegies, an African American musicians' museum. But while building such a gallery might be worthwhile, there's more to these ghosts than that. In Komunyakaa's poems, they're clanking the very chains of language.

       Pinetop's boogiewoogie
       keys stack against each other like syllables
       in tongue-tripped elegies for Lady Day
       & Duke.
       Don't try to make any sense
       out of this; just let it take you
       like Pres's tenor & keep you human.

Komunyakaa is an innovator; his language plays on the infinite nature of vocabulary. In scads of borrowed lyrics, from the upbeat "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay" down the druggy slope of "Purple Haze," the lexicons of jazz and blues supply him with a raw, articulate alter ego: "The tongue labors, / a victrola in the mad African-American mouth-hole / of 3 A.M. sorrow." Like a brother less self-conscious than the poet, music as Komunyakaa hears it is not merely a celebration or even a culmination of heritage and culture, but an entire alternate linguistic anatomy.

Music appears when and where traditional vocabulary falters. When, for example, a hot day triggers a black man's lust for a white woman, the poet segues to Johnny Mathis's "Beside Her Like a Whisper"; when a black farmer works his stubborn land and turns up nothing but rocks, he hums "Amazing Grace." Each song comes with scores of connotations. The light-skinned Mathis and the prayer "Amazing Grace" become evocative synonyms for more familiar and flatter words like impossibility, forbidden, coaxing, and even goddammit.

Komunyakaa speaks out of more than one side of his mouth—there's the narrator, his musical partner, the language we're used to, and the edges of something newer. Neon Vernacular, Komunyakaa's eighth collection, pushes the layered dialogue further. It contains about 30 pages of new poems, followed by generous selections from previous books. One of the longer new poems is "Songs for My Father," a piece in minute-long, verselike sections caused by sounds the poet hears—a hyenalike laugh, a meditative quiet, the noises of lovemaking—each of which remind him of his father.

       You were a quiet man
       Who'd laugh like a hyena
       On a hill, with your head
       Thrown back, gazing up at the sky
       But most times you just worked
       Hard, rooted in the day's anger
       Till you'd explode. We always
       Walked circles around
       You, wider each year …

The 170 long-playing pages amplify Komunyakaa's tonal range. He says, "The beast & the burden lock-step & waltz," and they do. Neon Vernacular gives rise to the hope that Coltrane, Duke, and Gordon will materialize as synonyms for sinewy or lugubrious, dimensional or heard in the turn-of-the-century thesaurus.

        Tremolo. Dexter comes back to rest
        behind my eyelids. A loneliness
        lingers like a silver needle
       under my black skin,
        as I try to feel how it is
       to scream for help through a horn.