The Chameleon Couch

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Overview

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011

A new and intimate collection from one of America's most important poets

The latest collection from one of our preeminent poets, The Chameleon Couch is also one of Yusef Komunyakaa's most personal to date. As in his breakthrough work, Copacetic, Komunyakaa writes again of music as muse—from a blues club in the East Village to the shakuhachi of Basho. Beginning with “Canticle,” this varied new collection often returns to the idea of poem as hymn, ethereal and haunting, as Komunyakaa reveals glimpses of memory, myth, and violence. With contemplations that spring up along walks ...

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More About This Book

Overview

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011

A new and intimate collection from one of America's most important poets

The latest collection from one of our preeminent poets, The Chameleon Couch is also one of Yusef Komunyakaa's most personal to date. As in his breakthrough work, Copacetic, Komunyakaa writes again of music as muse—from a blues club in the East Village to the shakuhachi of Basho. Beginning with “Canticle,” this varied new collection often returns to the idea of poem as hymn, ethereal and haunting, as Komunyakaa reveals glimpses of memory, myth, and violence. With contemplations that spring up along walks or memories conjured by the rhythms of New York, Komunyakaa pays tribute more than ever before to those who came before him.

The book moves seamlessly across cultural and historical boundaries, evoking Komunyakaa’s capacity for cultural excavation, through artifact and place. The Chameleon Couch begins in and never fully leaves the present—an urban modernity framed, brilliantly, in pastoral-minded verse. The poems seek the cracks beneath the landscape, whether New York or Ghana or Poland, finding in each elements of wisdom or unexpected beauty. The collection is sensually, beautifully relaxed in rhetoric; in poems like “Cape Coast Castle,” Komunyakaa reminds us of his gift for combining the personal with the universal, one moment addressing a lover, the next moving the focus outward, until both poet and reader are implicated in the book's startling world.

 

The Chameleon Couch is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry.

Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Elizabeth Lund
Komunyakaa's language is vivid, as always, and he changes subject matter effortlessly…The most welcome surprise is the poet's openness in this collection, his most personal and inviting yet.
—The Washington Post
Publishers Weekly
This 14th collection from Komunyakaa does not wear its ostensible subject—how to continually reinvent life when the past constantly wells up within the present—on its sleeve. But over the course of these poems, Komunyakaa revisits his shared love of jazz with the poet William Matthews, an earlier ease with multiple lovers ("back when it was easy to be/ at least two places at once"), an impossible-to-forget era where "a black boy or girl sent to the grocery store... / could disappear between a laugh &/ a cry," and, in a poem of the same title, "A Voice on an Answering Machine" that belongs to someone dead (who "lives between the Vale of Kashmir & nirvana, beneath a bipolar sky"). The ease and lack of defensive ornament allow a new kind of autobiographical poem to emerge, a daybook-like chronicle of what it is to have the freedom in later life to remake oneself moment by moment, while accommodating all that one has done, and those one has loved, before. The last poem, "Ontology and Guinness" is at once a joyous celebration of Obama's election and an effortlessly self-elegizing cenotaph. That the poem, which also sings the praises of a certain stout, holds together at all is a testament to its maker's will and invisible skill. (Apr.)
More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews
Library Journal
I am a black man, a poet, a bohemian,/ & there isn't a road my mind doesn't travel." Komunyakaa sounds a lot like Whitman. His poetry is personal, full of wonder, love, and drama. "I am a scrappy old lion," he tells us. More to the point, though, he is "the son of poor Mildred & illiterate J.W.," and his stories and themes will resonate with anyone who has loved, hurt, and watched as the world around him has taken bloom, gone gray, then burst into color again. With a feel for urban rhythms and an eye for pastoral beauty, in poems that walk us through New York City, Poland, Italy, Ghana, and elsewhere, Komunyakaa is a seeker. He finds more questions than answers, perhaps, but often enough with a bit of wisdom, and all the time it is bluesmen and jazzmen charting his way. VERDICT This is an important volume by one of the more important poets of our day, and therefore essential for lovers of the genre.—Louis McKee, Painted Bride Arts Ctr., Philadelphia

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780374533144
  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publication date: 3/27/2012
  • Pages: 128
  • Sales rank: 334,660
  • Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 0.50 (d)

Meet the Author

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa’s thirteen books of poems include Warhorses (FSG, 2008), Taboo (FSG, 2004), and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at Princeton University.

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