Description
The Paint-Box artists color in Adam & Eve, using every hue & cry of temptation. Because God blends into the darkness the faces keep coming off. --from "Chiaroscuro" With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity--the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. In "Taboo" he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes "Oroonoko" "as if she'd rehearsed it/for years in her spleen"; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is "still at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh." "Taboo" is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.
