Using a mere sixteen lines per poem, Yusef Komunyakaa has succeeded in pulling together a tight and awe-inspiring collection of poetry with Talking Dirty to the Gods. This collection features poems on a wide range of subjects, but really shines most in Komunyakaa's treatment of the seven deadly sins and figures from ancient mythology.
In "Sloth," for example, not only does Komunyakaa play with the double meaning of the word, his lyrical poetic style is lushly exemplified. Take these lines from the poem:
As if drugged in the womb
& limboed in a honeyed languor,
By the time you open your eyes
A thousand species have lived
& died
Komunyakaa always seems to bring a contemporary twist to the mythologies of the world that he explores in his poems. "Eros" is brought into modern times with these lines:
He'll return
To Club Limbo. A new counterfeit
Gift dipped in fire. Eros throws
A kiss to the teenage prostitute,
& touches the wad of greenbacks
Nestled against his groin.
Komunyakaa's choice of the four-line stanza, four-stanza poem, is a bold one. Hence, these are highly crafted poems. Each word has a tremendous weight upon it, and must convey a wealth of meaning. Komunyakaa succeeds here where many poets have failed. Too often, a pared-down poem teeters over the edge into vague abstraction. Komunyakaa is never vague, always clear and concise.
As the title implies, Talking Dirty to the Gods is daring and often raunchy and bawdy. These are works that deal with the baseness of human nature and all its proclivities. Even the picture on the cover is an amusingly lewd twist on what at first appears to be an ancient Greek statue of a toga-clothed woman carrying a canoe.
What Komunyakaa seems to be saying in many of his poems is that humans have always worshipped gods and have rebelled against those gods in some way or another throughout the ages. It's only the gods, the form of worship and the form of rebellion that have changed over time. We need gods and their rules to challenge us and confront us, so that we can use them to define who we are and what our role is in the world. I think these lines from "Meditations in a Swine Yard" really illustrate that notion:
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.
That Komunyakaa is able to convey these complex, ponderous concepts in just sixteen lines per poem is quite an accomplishment. That he manages to keep such a lyrical quality to those spare lines is an even greater one, making Talking Dirty to the Gods a very worthwhile and compelling read.
