Yusef Komunyakaa Potery Reviews

Yusef Komunyakaa in the first stanza talks about this man being a certain way. The man notices details like insects, and how he sees them "shiny as gold in a blues singer's teeth." But in the last line he closes with something else that he is. I sort of feel like the poem ends there, and he's starting something else in the next stanza. On his line, "but at heart I'm another breed," Komunyakaa closes the first stanza like he's going into another aspect or idea on the next stanza.

On his next stanza, Komunyakaa starts with another topic, "the audacity of the lower gods." I noticed how he ends the last stanza with "yellow sky" and not "blue sky," interesting. Again, here he's talking about lovers going untouched. On the last stanza, he goes on and talks about flowers. I'm thinking he's using flowers as a metaphor for anything else that is trained to do a specific job. He's letting each thing do what they do best, it could be anything. He's using flowers as an example. He has five lines on each stanza, and uses short and long line breaks.

Blackberries

Komunyakaa starts talking about blackberries right away in the first line. I can picture the man's hands, "like a printer's or thiefs before a police blotter." I felt like I was submerged into the poem right away--dragged into it. In the line, "terrestrial sweetness," I can smell and taste those morning sweet blackberries that fell in the ground. I noticed in this stanza, there's no period until the end of it. I like the way Komunyakaa describes the smell, "old line-covered" in the second stanza.

In the previous poem and also on this one, Komunyakaa mentions gods and mythology. I'm thinking he's into mythology because he also mentions the "gods" and the "underworld" in his other poems. These images give his poems a little bit of mystery in them, which I think is cool. He rhymes "forgiveness" and "blackness" in the 3^rd stanza. Each stanza has six lines, and the lines are long, especially in the last two stanzas.

In the Background of Silence

In this poem, I like the images Komunyakaa utilizes. For example, "worms," "eat away his left shoe," "heart...a gold thimble of ashes," "bones, honey comb," "like a dirt into a hole," "matchbox," "shirt pocket," "black coffee," "the sign of the cross a hundred times," and "skirt." All these images that he uses with some type of action or activity, I can really picture them.

He also uses repetition on his first stanza, "his heart, his bones, he falls," and then he uses "his" again in the following line, "his soul." And also in his last stanza he repeats the word "after" one line after the other, up to five lines. It's kind of funny how Komunyakaa puts it at the end. It makes me wonder if this woman the main character goes to bed with is his wife or a one night stand.