The wildly enchanting new collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning
poet Yusef Komunyakaa
"If I am not Ulysses, I am / his dear, ruthless half brother." So
announces Yusef Komunyakaa early in his lush new collection, The
Emperor of Water Clocks. And Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one
of the characters Komunyakaa conjures over the course of this densely
lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here
another recalls Napoleon as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his
heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; and here he is just a
man, reflecting on why he'd "rather die a poet / than a warrior."
Through these mutations and migrations and permutations and
peregrinations, there are constants: Komunyakaa's jazz-inflected
rhythms, his effortlessly surreal images, his celebration of natural
beauty and of love. There is also his insistent inquiry into the
structures and struggles of power: not only, say, of king against jester
but of man against his own desire, and of the present against the
pernicious influence of the past.
Another brilliant collection from the man David Wojahn has called one of
our "most significant and individual voices," The Emperor of Water
Clocks delights, challenges, and satisfies.