Dien Cai Dau is Komunyakaa's fourth book of poems. In his earlier three books, he has not included a single poem on Vietnam, because he has been waiting for emotional distance—objective and journalistic—from his 1969–70 Army tour there. George Garrett, in his introduction to [D. C.] Berry's saigon cemetery, proposes that "ordinary judgment [of Berry's poems] must be suspended. We are too close, and the wounds and scars, literal and metaphorical, are too fresh." It is just such a suspension of judgment that Komunyakaa does not want; he wishes his work to be tested with the full rigor applied to all serious poetry.

The fact that Komunyakaa has waited almost two decades to publish poems on Vietnam differentiates his work significantly from that of other veteran poets, especially those who published in the early '70s. The difference is not so much that he has achieved a distance from his Vietnam experience but rather that the development of his craft has not been inextricably bound up with Vietnam…. Komunyakaa comes to the material with an academic grounding in modernist and contemporary poetics as well as classic surrealism, and his work registers an esthetic advance not only of poetry about the Vietnam War but also of war literature in general.

From his first chapbook, Dedications and Other Darkhorses, (1977), through his most recent book, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head (1986), Komunyakaa's forte has been the counterbalancing of seeming oppositions and incongruities. Critics of Surrealism have pointed to "The poet Isidore Ducasse, the 'comte de Lautréamont,' who … had provided the classic example in writing of 'the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table'" [William S. Rubin in Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, 1968], a serendipitous yoking in whose interstices an immanent, wholly startling signification can well. Komunyakaa has inherited this mode of juxtaposition from the Surrealists, specifically through the poet Aimé Césaire. A typical example is "2527th Birthday of the Buddha":

        When the motorcade rolled to a halt, Quang Duc
        climbed out & sat down in the street.
        He crossed his legs,
        & the other monks & nuns grew around him like petals.
        He challenged the morning sun,
        debating with the air
        he leafed through-visions brought down to earth.
        Could his eyes burn the devil out of men?
        A breath of peppermint oil
        soothed someone's cry. Beyond terror made flesh-
        he burned like a bundle of black joss sticks.
        A high wind that started in California
        fanned flames, turned each blue page,
        leaving only his heart intact.
        Waves of saffron robes bowed to the gasoline can.

This poem takes as its base a kind of journalistic language, and of course the seed of the piece is the rumor that the heart of a self-immolated monk literally had not burned, a rumor perhaps gleaned from an actual news story. But the poem quickly moves into the contrapuntal surrealistic plane with "the other monks & nuns … like petals," setting up a group of images: petals, leaves, and finally pages, reminding us of Holy Writ. (And the phrase "terror made flesh" of course vibrates for Christian readers.) But the Komunyakaa wrinkle here is how the political situation is mystically manifested—American collusion made evident by the "high wind that started in California." The astonishing final image juxtaposes "saffron robes" with "the gasoline can," succinctly summing up the Vietnam War which arises from this volatile situation: "the gasoline can," a harbinger of technology which emblemizes violence and death, becomes a new deity, and all the saffron robes will be ultimately consumed.

Komunyakaa's surrealism varies from that of the other veteran poets because he does not depict Vietnam itself or the Vietnam experience as literally surreal, as do many of the other poets. Surrealism has been defined as "the attempt to actualize le merveilleux, the wonderland of revelation and dream, and by so doing to permit chance to run rampant in a wasteland of bleak reality" [Herbert S. Gershman, in The Surrealist Revolution in France, 1969]; in other words, the exploration of the strange, through fortuitous juxtaposition, allows revelation to occur in the midst of the real. Through surrealism, Komunyakaa discovers—or perhaps more appropriately, reveals—Vietnam and does not only document its apparent surreality for an incredulous audience. "Camouflaging the Chimera" enacts this process of revelation:

        We tied branches to our helmets.
        We painted our faces & rifles
        with mud from a riverbank,
 
        blades of grass hung from the pockets
        of our tiger suits. We wove
        ourselves into the terrain,
        content to be a hummingbird's target.
 
        We hugged grass & leaned
        against a breeze off the river,
        slowdragging with ghosts
 
        from Saigon to Bangkok,
        with women left in doorways
        reaching in from America.
        We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
        In our way station of shadows
        rock apes tried to blow our cover,
        throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons
 
        crawled our spines, changing from day
        to night: green to gold,
        gold to black. But we waited
        till the moon touched metal,
 
        till something almost broke
        inside us. VC struggled
        with the hillside, like black silk
 
        wrestling iron through grass.
        We weren't there. The river ran
        through our bones. Small animals took refuge
        against our bodies: we held our breath,
 
        ready to spring the L-shaped
        ambush, as a world revolved
        under each man's eyelid.

Surrealism in this poem does not function to present Vietnam to the reader as exotica, but rather to underline the existential reality of ambush: the internal psychic state of each combatant. The wish-fulfillment of camouflage involves becoming the landscape, abdicating one's memories and anything else which might disrupt the illusion. The angst of the situation, the impending firefight, is focused by "a world revolved / under each man's eyelid," a revamping of the cliché "my life passed before my eyes." Of course, the phrase also refers to "the world" or everything not Vietnam, delineating each soldier's acute realization that he does not belong in this place, that his death here would be literally senseless. The dramatic situation of this poem also acts certainly as a signifier for the entire war, and thus the word "Chimera" in the title serves as a political statement.

The poem "'You and I Are Disappearing'" (a quote from Björn Håkansson) is a bravura performance highlighting Komunyakaa's technique of juxtaposed images:

        The cry I bring down from the hills
        belongs to a girl still burning
        inside my head. At daybreak
               she burns like a piece of paper.
        She burns like foxfire
        in a thigh-shaped valley.
        A skirt of flames
        dances around her
        at dusk.
                    We stand with our hands
        hanging at our sides,
        while she burns
                   like a sack of dry ice.
        She burns like oil on water.
        She burns like a cattail torch
        dipped in gasoline.
        She glows like the fat tip
        of a banker's cigar,
              silent as quicksilver.
        A tiger under a rainbow
           at nightfall.
        She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
        She burns like a field of poppies
        at the edge of a rain forest.
        She rises like dragonsmoke
            to my nostrils.
        She burns like a burning bush
        driven by a godawful wind.

In this poem, Komunyakaa is performing "the kind of intellectual wrestling that moves and weaves us through human language," as he told me in an interview. According to Komunyakaa, "language is what can liberate or imprison the human psyche," and this poem dramatizes a speaker who is simultaneously liberated and imprisoned. The speaker here is at a loss to describe this scene fittingly. The charged language grapples with a view that is both unimaginably beautiful and incredibly horrible, all at the same time. The speaker, again and again, tries to find a metaphor that will convey both the beauty and the horror—the dilemma of speaking the Sublime, in Edmund Burke's terms. And the speaker comes enticingly, asymptotically close without finding the ideal phrase. Finally, he simply has to stop. And the final image points a biblical finger: the girl will always burn in the speaker's mind in the same way that the burning bush could have burned forever unconsumed. What really nails this image is the phrase "godawful wind" which puns on "awful God," straight out of the Old Testament, while it resurrects the root meaning full of awe, or more properly here, filling with awe.

"'You and I Are Disappearing'" also demonstrates Komunyakaa's poetic ancestry in English, specifically William Carlos Williams and his use of the image…. [According to critic Marjorie Perloff], Williams' recurrent images—wind, flower, star, white, dark—are perfectly ordinary, but it is their relationships that matter." If we ignore for a moment that the signified is "she"—a human being—Komunyakaa's images here are similarly ordinary: "a piece of paper," "oil on water," a "cigar," "a shot glass of vodka," "a field of poppies"; others are lexically more interesting but still reasonably innocent: "foxfire," "a sack of dry ice," "a rainbow," "dragonsmoke." What drives this poem is the anaphoric repetition of "she burns"—the accretion of which underlines the intrinsic horror of the poem and, by extension, the war itself. The ultimate focus is on humanity and on humaneness.

Many of the poems in Dien Cai Dau deal with human response and connection in combat. "Nude Pictures" begins at the end, only implying the story which comes before:

        I slapped him a third time.
        The song caught in his throat
        for a second, & the morning
        came back together like after
        a stone has been dropped
        through a man's reflection
        hiding in a river. I slapped him
        again, but he wouldn't stop
 
        laughing. As we searched
        for the squad, he drew us
        to him like a marsh loon
        tied to its half-gone song
        echoing over rice fields
        & through wet elephant grass
        smelling of gunpowder & fear.
        I slapped him once more.
        Booby-trapped pages floated
        through dust. His laughter
        broke off into a silence
        early insects touched
        with a tinge of lost music.
        He grabbed my hand & wouldn't
        let go. Lifted by a breeze,
        a face danced in the treetops.

In "2527th Birthday of the Buddha," the typical Komunyakaa opposition is the documentary vs. the figurative; here the conflict is between nature and human intrusion. The morning shattered by a firefight "came back together like after / a stone has been dropped through a man's reflection / hiding in a river." The "stone," a semaphore for gunfire, intrudes upon the harmony between humans and nature—here, the squad and the morning. Now the hysterical soldier intrudes upon the reassembled morning, "like a marsh loon / tied to its half-gone song" (i.e., nature gone mad).

The final human intrusion occurs in the arresting close: "Lifted by a breeze, / a face danced in the treetops." Literally, of course, this is a wafting scrap of girlie magazine, with the face coincidentally framed. On a figurative level, however, the image finally rescues humanity: the lexical territory of "Lifted" and "danced" argues for an upbeat ending here. Just as the speaker and the sole surviving soldier hold hands … so too are humans and nature harmoniously reunited, if only metaphorically.

Komunyakaa's devotion to a highly textured language is clearly evident in the poems already discussed. There are arresting turns of phrase throughout Dien Cai Dau: a tunnel rat moves "Through silver / lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence"; the Viet Cong are "lords over loneliness / winding like coralvine through / sandalwood & lotus"; conspirators plan a fragging, "their bowed heads / filled with splintered starlight"; an armored personnel carrier is "droning like a constellation / of locusts eating through bamboo." For the most part, however, the language of Dien Cai Dau is a spoken language, in the Wordsworthian sense—it is the extraordinary way in which these everyday words are combined which makes the poems significant….

[Komunyakaa] uses the "grunt's" language and speech for credibility. In "Hanoi Hannah," however, he places the argot in the mouth of the enemy, to demonstrate the ambivalent ambience of Vietnam:

        Ray Charles! His voice
        calls from waist-high grass,
        & we duck behind gray sandbags.
        "Hello, Soul Brothers. Yeah,
        Georgia's also on my mind."
        Flares bloom over the trees.
        "Here's Hannah again.
        Let's see if we can't
        light her goddamn fuse
        this time." Artillery
        shells carve a white arc
        against dusk. Her voice rises
        from a hedgerow on our left.
        "It's Saturday night in the States.
        Guess what your woman's doing tonight.
        I think I'll let Tina Turner
        tell you, you homesick GIs."
        Howitzers buck like a herd
        of horses behind concertina.
        "You know you're dead men
        don't you? You're dead
        as King today in Memphis.
        Boys, you're surrounded by
        General Tran Do's division."
        Her knife-edge song cuts
        deep as a sniper's bullet.
        "Soul Brothers, what you dying for?"
        We lay down a white-klieg
        trail of tracers. Phantom jets
        fan out over the trees.
        Artillery fire zeros in.
        Her voice grows flesh
        & we can see her falling
        into words, a bleeding flower
        no one knows the true name for.
        "You're lousy shots, GIs."
        Her laughter floats up
        as though the airways are
        buried under our feet.

It is interesting to note here that Hannah speaks not just colloquial English, but fluent black English; her speech is so well tuned as to be virtually indistinguishable from the American voice who says "Let's see if we can't / light her goddamn fuse / this time." That Komunyakaa is black generally makes no difference in many of the poems in Dien Cai Dau, but here it is significant because blacks (and hence the poet) are being directly addressed here by the Viet Cong; Hannah plays Ray Charles and Tina Turner, speaks to "Soul Brothers," and taunts them with Martin Luther King's assassination—it may well be the speaker's first realization of that event. As this poem shuttles between reported speech and narrative passages, it displays a seamlessness of diction, unlike that of earlier Vietnam—veteran poets like Paquet, who deliberately embattles one set of connotations against another for tension. Here, the everyday diction—"duck behind," "light her … fuse," "buck like a herd / of horses"—is allowed to rest easy with slightly more elevated phrases—"carve a white arc," "knife-edge song," "white-klieg / trail of tracers." But the salient point here is Hannah's intimate command of English and the social nuances conveyed by language.

The plight of the "grunt" home from the war is handled by Komunyakaa differently from other veteran poets, and this variance arises partly from questions of race. The black soldier remembers a different Vietnam: Viet Cong leaflets saying, "VC didn't kill / Dr. Martin Luther King"; the white bars and the black bars on "Tu Do Street" in Saigon, the black POW remembering "those rednecks" in Georgia, "Bama," and Mississippi to help him through VC torture. But other poems focus more universally on the generic returnee. The poem "Combat Pay for Jody" focuses on a soldier and his inevitable encounter with Jody, the folkloric figure back home who steals every combat soldier's wife or girlfriend:

       I counted tripflares
       the first night at Cam Ranh Bay,
       & the molten whistle of a rocket
       made me sing her name into my hands.
       I needed to forget the sea
       between us, the other men.
       Her perfume still crawled
       my brain like a fire moth,
       & it took closing a dead man's eyes
       to bring the war's real smell
       into my head. The quick fire
       danced with her nude reflection,
       & I licked an envelope each month
       to send blood money,
       kissing her lipstick mouthprints
       clustering the perfumed paper,
       as men's voices collected
       in the gray weather I inhaled.
       Her lies saved me that year.
       I rushed to the word
       Love at the bottom of a page.
       One day, knowing a letter waited,
       I took the last chopper back to Chu Lai,
       an hour before the firebase was overrun
       by NVA. Satchel charges
       blew away the commander's bunker,
       & his men tried to swim the air.
       A week later when I returned
       to Phoenix, the city hid her
       shadow & I couldn't face myself
       in the mirror. I asked her used-to-be
       if it was just my imagination,
       since I'd heard a man
       could be boiled down to his deeds.
       He smiled over his wine glass
       & said, "It's more, man.
       Your money bought my new Chevy."

This poem literally brings clichés to life. The testimony of a "grunt" for whom the thought of his lover functioned as a chivalric favor preserving him from harm is so common that it becomes apocryphal. Ditto for the stories of Jody's legendary exploits. In "Combat Pay for Jody," Komunyakaa has composed a vividly lyrical narrative which encompasses the thousand days of the speaker's Vietnam tour and his eventual return to "the world." More importantly, he has created a realistic voice which re-enlivens the overworked clichés of military life and which points up the returning soldier's inability to navigate in what used to be his personal landscape.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become an emblem of the difficulties of the Vietnam veteran, and Komunyakaa's poem "Facing It" (the closing poem in the book) does exactly what its title says—face the monument and what it signifies:

      My black face fades,
      hiding inside the black granite.
      I said I wouldn't,
      dammit: No tears.
      I'm stone. I'm flesh.
      My clouded reflection eyes me
      like a bird of prey, the profile of night
      slanted against morning. I turn
      this way—the stone lets me go.
      I turn this way—I'm inside
      the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
      again, depending on the light
      to make a difference.
      I go down the 58,022 names,
      half-expecting to find
      my own in letters like smoke.
      I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
      I see the booby trap's white flash.
      Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
      but when she walks away
      the names stay on the wall.
      Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
      wings cutting across my stare.
      The sky. A plane in the sky.
      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.

This poem is literally a reflection about reflections; it is a "facing" of the dualities that govern this everyday life: there and here, America and Vietnam, living and dead, night and day, old and young, white and black (i.e., Caucasian and Negro). Komunyakaa does not declaim, does not decry; instead he presents, practically unmediated, a series of images. Like the speaker of "'You and I Are Disappearing'"—the poem about the burning girl—the poet here is faced with an ineffable scene, but instead of searching for apt metaphors to voice his feeling, he reverts to a reportorial mode. Everything ultimately is point of view, and we are always "depending on the light / to make a difference." This is what Vietnam poetry (and all poetry in essence) must do—enlighten, give light, illuminate, the better for all to see and see well.

Dien Cai Dau is a breathtakingly original work of art because of the believable, down-to-earth language which speaks the thoughts and feelings of authentic characters, filtered through Komunyakaa's atypical vision. In the last line of Dien Cai Dau—a book whose title, after all, means "crazy"—a woman is "brushing a boy's hair," an action which affirms sanity and life in the face of the insanity of the war: the love between a mother and child, between two human beings. Writing about [Bruce] Weigl's The Monkey Wars, Smith proposes the potential of a "salvific poetic vision which might unify past and present, anguish and affirmation" [Lorrie Smith, in "A Sense-Making Perspective in Recent Poetry by Vietnam Veterans," American Poetry Review (November-December) 1986]; Komunyakaa fulfills this promise in Dien Cai Dau.

Komunyakaa's achievement points to the possibility and actuality of self-renewal and solace in poetry by Vietnam veterans. As the body of poetry by veterans moves from mere documentary to self-discovery and personal commitment, from a gratuitous surrealism to a conscientious use of French surrealistic technique, future work by Vietnam-veteran poets becomes increasingly able to transcend the paralyzing horror of the Vietnam War…. The transcendental possibilities in poetry by Vietnam veterans, therefore, can make possible a more accurate national vision of the Vietnam War—both in documentary and spiritual terms—allowing us, as a nation, to confront fully the moral consequences of our presence in Vietnam. Perhaps, in some near future, it may not be too optimistic to wish, with [W. D.] Ehrhart, that "the soul of the nation might somehow be cleansed" by poetry.