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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Talking Dirty to the Gods Talking Dirty to the Gods : Page 1, 2 The poem reminds me of the photograph series by Catherine Chalmers - larvae destroying a tomato, a mantis eating the larvae, another mantis eating the first mantis, a frog eating mantis number two - which is currently on display at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Her enormous jewel-tone prints take the savagery of the insect world and turn it into something almost beautiful. Similarly, "Bedazzled" shows us insects that are akin to gems: the jeweled wasp, the violated cockroach "bright as Satan's lost tiepin." The brilliance of the images draws its own contrast with the nastiness of the poem's subject. But Komunyakaa does not limit himself to the animal world, nor to the classical allusions that the book's title and cover evoke. "Castrato" speaks in an alternate voice: now it's the mythology of Grimm's fairy tales that give the lines resonance.
In the middle of the poem, between stanzas two and three, comes the image which haunts me most: "Please note// This: hymns die on my tongue/ Before they can heal." Castrati no longer exist, of course, but in some way the castrato is a perfect emblem of the always-already-broken human condition that the postmodernists postulate. Words - which might, in a less hopeless perspective, have the capacity to salve or heal - die on the castrato's tongue, as if his wounded condition barred him from even the possibility of communication, prayer, salvation. The lyric form Komunyakaa's chosen is a challenging one, and I don't doubt his skill. I also don't doubt the exquisiteness of his language. I am impressed with the power in these poems. But by the end of this book my head hurts. I find myself retreating into Maxine Kumin and Leo Dangel, seeking plain narrative poems as antidote to this collection's tight weave. Sometimes I think the primary readers of poetry are other poets, and I wonder how we might introduce non-readers to the joys of the line break. A handful of the poems in this collection are at once so incandescent and so transparent that they'd make perfect introductions to what poetry can do. The rest of the book is, to my mind, a better fit for an intermediate poetry reader than for a beginner. If you're new to poetry, this isn't the best place to start. Pick up the most recent Best American Poetry instead; by the time you finish it, you'll have a better sense of how to enter a poem (and I'll bet you'll be in love with at least five of the poems inside; maybe one will even be the Komunyakaa poem from this collection). If you've done this diving-into-verse thing before, take a crack at Talking Dirty to the Gods. It rewards close reading and intense attention; it takes energy, but I think it's worth it in the end. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your book? Rachel Barenblat is co-founder of Inkberry, a literary organization in the Berkshires. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. A chapbook of her poems, the skies here, was published by Pecan Grove Press (San Antonio) in 1995. Learn more at www.rachelbarenblat.com |
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