|
Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Talking Dirty to the Gods
Ten pages into Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty to the Gods, I hit the first poem that makes me sit up and pay attention.
Damn. Komunyakaa's not pulling punches; he mixes the sacred and the profane with a fearless hand. In this paradigm the maggot is sibling to the godhead, the putrescence that it engenders is a symbol of order, and our ultimate fate of corporeal dissolution is the purest ontological truth. Words work double duty in this one: "the root of all things" means both physical roots, as trees have (underground, in the maggots' domain), and mathematical roots (square roots, the number at another number's core). As the book's title indicates, this collection takes an irreverent and sometimes insolent tone where divinity is concerned - and nowhere more so than in "Ode to the Maggot." I'm more a Hebrew Scriptures buff than a New Testament one, but even I recognize the allusion in the poem's final couplet, and Komunyakaa's recasting of the lines makes me shiver with a mixture of amazement and surprise. Every time I read the poem I'm struck anew by its juxtapositions: "slabs of bad pork/ & flophouses," Caesar's tomb and a field of ragweed. The line between death and religion, Komunyakaa seems to be saying, is blurry - and the transformation from life to physical ruin is as close as we get to resurrection. There are half a dozen poems in the book that I love as much as this one. The rest are hard for me to access. Some feel lackluster. Others are so erudite that I feel barred by my inability to read the allusions that are plainly there. Still, the poems that work for me are the kind of exquisite creations I can revisit endlessly. In "Bedazzled," Komunyakaa returns to the gory subject of the natural world's cycles.
|
|||||||||
