Professor Yusef Komunyaka is simply an amazing poet and is a member of the Brotherhood of Southern Writers. He is the winner of the Kingsley Taft Poetry Prize in 1994 and the Pulitzer Prize for his book, Neon folk , In the spring of 2009, I read four of his books for class and was simply amazed at the brilliance I met in his poems. He served as a military correspondence during the Vietnam conflict and was right in the middle of a shootout where he wrote his stories.
Reading Dien Cai Dau brings battlefields in the jungle right before your eyes. It is realistic, dynamic and bright. By serving in the army with the Airborne Infantry, I can identify with the principles, concepts, and thoughts in this amazing and realistic book.
First poem Camouflage Chimera cools For example, read these lines: “The river ran through our bones. Small animals sheltered from our bodies, we held our breath, ready to bring an L-shaped ambush. ” Such an ambush is one of the most deadly for any enemy force that is trapped and could not escape.
Moving on to another striking poem entitled, the tunnels This one is more breathtaking. These are his words: "Crawling upside down into a hole, he kicked the air and disappeared." This is a tunnel rat that finds the enemy underground in a swamp, musky, mud and mud.
“Fragment” is a situation where a soldier should never find himself. This means the death of a person who was “deceived”, and occurs when a high-ranking person imitates others in his own part on the battlefield, thereby creating hatred and conflict. Listen to these frightening words: “Having slipped a finger into a metal ring, he married the devil — a spoon crawls out. Everything breaks down for a green cover, like a hundred red birds released from a wooden box. "
Observation of a person’s burn is really terrible, especially when a person cannot do anything to save a person. These words highlight such a reality in the poem. You and I disappear : “We stand there with our hands on our side, while it burns like a bag of dry ice, it burns like oil on water, it burns like a glass of vodka, it burns like a burning bush driven by the perfidious wind. "
These verses in the next poem are very deadly. They will come out from anywhere in the middle of the night and launch an attack. Listen to these words from the poem Sappers : “They fall and rise again, like torchbearers, with their naked bodies, so that the moonlight dances from their skins.” The images in this section are bright and sharp. One is able to see them clearly.
I don't need to write anything about these verses. The picture is absolutely obvious that the poems in this book are simply breathtaking and dramatic. You need to read this book to appreciate the drama.
More information about Professor Yusef Komunyak, Pulitzer Prize Winner of 1994, can be obtained at the following site:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/komunyakaa/biography.php/
