Talking Dirty to the Gods : Poems

English

ISBN: 0374527938

EAN: 9780374527938

Category: Poetry / General

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Release Date: 08/22/2011

Synopsis: A daredevil poetic achievement nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award . . . A god isnt worth A drop of water in the hell of his good Imagination, if we cant curse Sunsets & threaten to forsake him In his storehouse of belladonna, Tiger hornets, & snakebites. --from Meditations in a Swine Yard No turn in any life cycle is taboo as Yusef Komunyakaa examines the primal rituals shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities inTalking Dirty to the Gods. From Hearsay to Heresy, these 132 poems, each consisting of four quatrains, are framed by innuendo and lively satire. Komunyakaa looks to nature and configures his own paradigm, in which an event as commonplace as the jewel wasp laying an egg in a cockroach becomes every bit as grand as Zeuss infidelity. The formally rigorous collection is itself a design for a systematic cosmos, a world compressed but abundant in surprise and delight. Yusef Komunyakaawas born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1947. His eleven books of poems includeNeon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. A professor in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, Komunyakaa received the 2004 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. These prismatic lyricsso solidly constructed, so thematically expansivespeak of, and for, the primal rituals and ribald taboos shared by insects, animals, human beings, and deities. Komunyakaas mournful surrealism seems to have found a perfect mathematical embodiment, observedThe New Yorker. [This book] comprises 132 poems of four four-line stanzas. These are poems about the uncontrollable human and natural mysteries, and they are made sharper and more mysterious by the eternal recurrence of the stanzaic structure. Komunyakaas lexical and historical range is large, and his improvisations move effortlessly from Theocritus to Rimbaud, Chet Baker, and the Black Panthers. These are poems about the uncontrollable human and natural mysteries, and they are made sharper and more mysterious by the eternal recurrence of [this books] stanzaic structure. Komunyakaas lexical and historical range is large, and his improvisations move effortlessly from Theocritus to Rimbaud, Chet Baker, and the Black Panthers.The New Yorker Komunyakaa wonderfully achieves the combined mischief and moralizing of Catullus, one of his acknowledged heroes . . . He refuses to be trivial; and he even dares beauty.April Bernard,The New York Times Book Review [This] new volume is remarkable exactly because its a category killer, a sustained anti-hierarchy. The hundred-plus poems speak equally to gods and maggots, to the mythical reaches of history, and to erotic immediacy . . . [Komunyakaa] discovers a spirited materialism, the landscape pantheistically aglow, the prime matter seemingly always at hand.Village Voice Literary Supplement(from the citation as one of the 25 Favorite Books of 2000)

Awards: National Book Critics Circle Awards – null 

Excerpt: Unknown Property Excerpt

Talking Dirty to the Gods : Poems

Illustrated: No

Format: Paperback

Height: 0.38 inches

Width: 5.28 inches

Length: 7.62 inches

Weight: 5.29 oz

Pages: 144