Title: Warhorses : poems /
Authors: Komunyakaa, Yusef
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
Year: 2008
Subjects: War poetry; Love poetry
Abstract: "This new collection of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry delves, with his characteristic allusiveness, intelligence, and intensity, into an age of war and conflict, both global and internal, racial and sexual. "Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles' / shield," and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Taboo and Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like "Autobiography of My Alter Ego" he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted but desperate prophet. With the leaps and improvisational flourishes of a jazz soloist, Komunyakaa imagines "the old masters of Shock & Awe" daydreaming of "lovely Penelope / like a trophy." Warhorses is the stunning work of a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers."--Jacket.
Contents: Love in the time of war. The jawbone of an ass. A shank -- Gilgamesh's Humbaba was a distant drum -- Here, the old masters of Shock & Awe -- The Mameluke, slave & warrior, springs -- They swarmed down over the town -- My wide hips raised two warriors -- Hand-to-hand : the two hugged each other -- Tribe. Clan. Valley & riverbank. Country. Continent. Interstellar -- The drummer's hands were bloody -- Tonight, the old hard work of love -- When our hands caress bullets & grenades -- A bottle-nosed dolphin swims midnight water -- Someone's beating a prisoner -- His name is called. A son's lost voice -- Heavy metal. The helmet -- The catapult -- Warhorses -- The clay army -- The panorama -- Guernica -- Grenade -- The towers -- Heavy metal soliloquy -- The warlord's garden -- Surge -- Clouds -- The Hague -- The devil comes on horseback -- The crying hill -- Autobiography of my alter ego.