I never much liked Auden’s description of a poem as a “verbal contraption”. Such a definition felt too facile and emotionally barren for a poem. But the word “contraption” does imply a poem’s unwieldy nature and its challenge. No poet ever referred to a poem as a well-oiled machine. Its replacement parts are expensive and hard to find. And if you change one part, you’re liable to break something else.

One way poets have dealt with such an unwieldy bit of business as a poem is through the use of forms. In his latest book, Talking Dirty to the Gods, Yusef Komunyakaa has continued this tradition. His book contains over 100 poems, all 16 lines in length, all composed of four quatrains.

In some hands, the quatrain can be that most turgid of stanzas—solid, four-sided and square. Fortunately, Komunyakaa’s wit and verve allow him to play with his chosen form rather than simply conform to it.

The subject matter of the book confirms Komunyakaa to be a metaphysical poet. He savors paradox; his passion is intelligent and his intelligence passionate. In a way these poems are like sacred sonnets, if you’re willing to expand your notion of what is sacred to include almost every religious tradition: Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, pantheistic and others, and various life forms, from “lowest” (slime mold) to “highest” (“Homo Erectus”).

But these poems do not merely praise a faultless divinity, they take issue with the sacred. Again, to quote Auden:

     How many poems have been written, for example, upon      one of these themes:

     This was sacred but now it is profane. Alas,
     or thank goodness!
     This is sacred but ought it to be?
     This is sacred but is that so important?

Komunyakaa asks all three of these questions in this book, which is part of why it is so satisfying.

While I enjoyed the re-telling of stories about old gods, I was most intrigued by Komunyakaa’s new pantheon. These post-modern deities include “The God of Broken Things”, “The God of Variables” and “The Goddess of Quotas”.

Here’s a passage from “The God of Variables Laments”:

     The other day I was dining out
     With You Know Who, saying
     Don’t worry if they call you PC
     Lady, because they only want

     To question your heart till it’s nothing
     But a pinch of rock salt.

It’s great to see Komunyakaa buck the anti-PC trend, and with a wicked sense of humor to boot.

Other subtle and effective swipes at politics and the status quo include “Scapegoat” and the “White Hat”.

In the tradition of the psalms and other divine meditations, Komunyakaa is not afraid to confront the divine. These lines are from “Meditations in a Swine Yard”:

     . . .A god isn’t worth
     A drop of water in the hell of his good

     Imagination, if we can’t curse
     Sunsets & threaten to forsake him
     In his storehouse of belladonna,
     Tiger hornets & snakebites.

Like many of the gods depicted in these poems, this book’s vices are directly related to its virtues. While the adherence to a standard form gives the book a dense quality of formal beauty, at times the rhythm of specific poems and even their tone can feel repetitive.

The New Yorker’s brief review used the word “quintessence” in describing Mr. Komunyakaa’s most recent efforts, a word that is sometimes used to imply heights that cannot be sustained. Fortunately, every few poems, Komunyakaa does what he does to us in “Ode to the Maggot”--puts our noses an inch from the dirt and holds it there until we get that smell deep inside us, a smell both rancid and sweet.

When he reminds us of our humble beginnings as a species (in “Homo Erectus”) the story and the language are quintessential Komunyakaa. And that is about as good as it gets.

     Homo Erectus

     After pissing around his gut-level
     Kingdom, he builds a fire & hugs
     A totem against his chest.
     Cheetahs pace the horizon

     To silence a grassy cosmos
     Where carrion birds sing
     Darkness back from the hills,
     Something in the air, quintessence or rancor

     Makes a langur bash the skull
     Of another male’s progeny.
     The mother tries to fight him off,
     But this choreographer for Jacob

     & the Angel knows defeat
     Arrives in an old slam dance
     & applied leverage—The Evening Star
     In both eyes, something less than grace.

Donna Johnson has studied with several poets in the Boston area, including Lucie Brock-Broido and Henri Cole. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Georgia and has an M.A. in Psychology from the University of Connecticut. She recently won the University of Nevada's annual Black Rock Press Broadside Competition and has poems in the Green Mountain Review and Web Del Sol's Editor's Picks. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters and works as a programmer.

 Donna

 Johnson