[In the following review of Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular, Finkelstein praises the poet's work.]

Yusef Komunyakaa's Neon Vernacular presents about twenty years worth of poetry: poetry that shudders with desire, past and present, frustrated and fulfilled. Remembrance is the motive force behind much of this work, but the past is rarely presented as a scene, neither a background for a current emotional state nor a canvas on which the poet can show off his descriptive powers. Rather, in Komunyakaa's strongest poems, time is the medium for a complex dialogue, which is intensified by the poet's mordant wit and flashy but carefully modulated language. Komunyakaa's sense of personal time is infected by the disease of history. When memory and anecdote constitute the poem's body, it's best not to seek a cure.

Thus, much of Komunyakaa's best poetry emerges from his experiences in the Vietnam War. This work, which dates from the mid-eighties, has an immediacy that goes well beyond typical poetry of remembrance while preserving all of its powers of reflection. Difficult to excerpt, these poems depend on the interplay of searing images and a sad, knowing, cautious voice which enunciates them over a temporal distance both too long and too short for words. Here is the entirety of “We Never Know”:

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.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.

Happily, Komunyakaa's weaving of personal time and historical circumstance extends beyond the battle zone. Consider these lines from “Work,” a recent poem about cutting the lawn for a rich white family. While “Her husband's outside Oxford / Mississippi, bidding on miles / Of timber” and perhaps “buying / Faulkner's ghost,” the lady of the house sunbathes:

… This antebellum house
Looms behind oak & pine
Like a secret, as quail
Flash through branches.
I won't look at her. Nude
On a hammock among elephant ears
& ferns, a pitcher of lemonade
Sweating like our skin.
Afternoon burns on the pool
Till everything's blue,
Till I hear Johnny Mathis
Beside her like a whisper.

By now, this must be a locus classicus or primal scene of instruction for a male African-American writer, but Komunyakaa manages to balance the personal and historical, as “Scent of honeysuckle / Sings black sap through mystery, / Taboo, law, creed, what kills / A fire that is its own heart / Burning open the mouth.”

An able lyricist, Komunyakaa knows that it's always best to add a touch of vinegar to even his most insidiously sweet lines, as in this passage on body painting in “Passions,” from Lost in the Bonewheel Factory (1979):

To step into the golden lute
& paint one's soul
on the body. Bird
goddess & slow snake
in the flowered tree. Circle,
lineage, womb, mouth, leaf-footed
godanimal on a man's chest
who leaps into the moon
on a woman's belly.

“The Way the Cards Fall,” from Copacetic (1984) has a kind of grace comparable to that of Williams's “Widow's Lament in Springtime”:

The pear & apple trees
have even missed you—
dead branches scattered
about like war. Come closer,
my eyes have grown night-dim.
Across the field white boxes
of honeybees silent as dirt,
silent as your missent
postcards. Evening
sunlight's faded my hair,
the old stable's slouched
to the ground. …

Komunyakaa doesn't always hit the mark like this; sometimes the lyric memories come a little too easily, as in new poems such as “A Good Memory” and “Songs for My Father.” Nor am I completely convinced by his vernacular, which can sometimes sound contrived:

His voice can break into butterflies
just as the eight ball cracks
across deep-green felt,
growing silent with something unsaid
like a mouth stuffed with nails.
He can go off his rocker, sell the family
business for a dollar, next morning
pull a Brink's job & a hijack a 747.

(from “The Heart's Graveyard Shift”)

But like the jazz musicians he celebrates and elegizes, Komunyakaa never takes his instrument for granted. Twisting, searching, and almost always resisting the easy harmonies, Komunyakaa's poetry reminds us that form is a vexation, a summons, a responsibility, “Like an unknown voice rising / out of flesh.” This is work that chastens more often than it solaces. Yet its urgency is not to be denied.