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Synopsis
A musical desert elegy on life born from loss.
Publishers Weekly
In this first collection since his Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems, Komunyakaa brings his lush, propulsive, myth-making language to a wide range of subjects: Charlie Parker and Ishi; the California Indian; the wildlife of Australia and South Africa. All are the title's 'thieves,' casing the joint and then snatching the bliss brought to us by the senses: 'the lips,/salt & honeycomb on the tongue.../ how everything begs/ blood into song & prayer/ inside an egg.' Such pleasures are found and taken despite the lingering pain of Vietnam, where 'the earth swings on a bellrope, limp as a body bag tied to a limb, and the moon overflows with blood,' and the dark history of Western culture. 'The Tally,' a brilliant reckoning of 18th-century trade, reveals the taint even intellectual history bears: 'They're counting nails,/ barrels of salt pork,/ sacks of tea and sugar.../ They're uncrating hymnals,/ lace, volumes of Hobbes,/ Rousseau & kegs of rum./ ...They're counting women/ & men.' But Komunyakaa, a Princeton professor, also finds resonance in that culture, invoking Pascal, Goya and 'The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam' as sources of meaning and joy, along with 'Cracker Jacks' and 'Art Tatum's keys.' Here, as in the work of kindred spirits the Beats, a deliberately raw poetry is fruitfully thrown in with the cooked. The resulting vision of paradise -- 'the same feeling that drives/ sap through mango leaves,/ up into the fruit's sweet/ flesh & stony pit' is a compelling one.