Neon Vernacular
Komunyakaa's Pulitzer-winning collected and new poems span his Vietnam War experience (Dien Cai Dau, 1988), his Louisiana childhood, and jazz as a metaphysical system. He is the great African American poet of the war poem; his Vietnam poems are the best of that war by an enormous margin, combining blues rhythm, surrealist image, and a moral seriousness that never becomes preachy. "Facing It," his meditation on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is among the most perfect short poems in American literature.
Collected volumes are pitiless, and this one carries the late-seventies apprentice work in which Komunyakaa is still hunting the voice Dien Cai Dau found. The surrealist jump-cuts that electrify the Vietnam poems can, elsewhere, blur into private shorthand; you finish some poems admiring the texture without being able to say what happened in them.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
