Of course, the Black Arts movement was not simply one thing, nor in the end was its parameters as strict as the previous white demands on black writing that it rebelled against. Jazz metaphors come to mind when thinking of Komunyakaa especially, and not only because he has been co-editor of Jazz Poetry anthologies. With his latest book, Thieves of Paradise, Komunyakaa makes himself over akin to Picasso and Miles Davis, combining classicism and innovation. It's no accident that this Vietnam vet, whose Dien Cai Dau chronicled the war in a brilliant and balanced fashion, has returned to this crossroads of violence and history. We proceed from daybreak to twilight, the poems taking on even more than before a Bitches Brew as devastating as it is unexpected.
Thieves reads like another take on a selected poems.
With Thieves, he demonstrates the range of a whole new vernacular-from quatrains to prose poems, from ecstasy to war. I know if you touch beauty right a bird sings the monkey to you. Harry told me about the LSD one Friday night in April, what God kept telling him. Harry said an axe was used, but John says he cut off a leg with a power saw. The trees ignite the brook.