The Emperor of Water Clocks: Poems

by Yusef Komunyakaa, Jeff Clark (Designed by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536572
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/04/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	960,604
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Yusef Komunyakaa's books of poetry include Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and Testimony: A Tribute to Charlie Parker. His plays, performance art, and librettos have been performed internationally and include Wakonda's Dream, Saturnalia, Testimony, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. He teaches at New York University.

Editorial Reviews

"A rich, multilayered book that combines threads of fable, literature, music and cultural references to create a new kind of mythology." —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

"Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period's most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter and to the taut concision of his free verse . . . Dazzling." —David Wojahn, Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa

"Probably my favorite living poet. No one else taught me more about how important it was to think about how words make people feel. It's not enough for people to know something is true. They have to feel it's true." —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The New York Times Style Magazine

From the Publisher

08/17/2015
Big, full of characters, pleasant, and global in scope, Pulitzer Prize–winner Komunyakaa (The Chameleon Couch) moves away from the topics that won him his fame in a collection that should rank among his finest. During the 1980s, Komunyakaa’s distinctively syncopated, jazz-influenced lines portrayed his Louisiana youth and his experience in Vietnam; more recently his sequences have updated and retold myths. Here, the poet is all over the map: ancient Egypt to Venice, “Yama or Carthage,” Appalachia and beyond. He asks, “How many fallen empires dwell here triggered by a sundial,/ revolutions & rebirths?” Komunyakaa pursues an almost Heaney-like lyricism: “night sirens/ singing my birth when water/ broke into a thousand blossoms/ in a landlocked town of the South.” Yet he returns focus to an array of mythical, current, and historical persons: out-of-work actors in modern Manhattan, Japanese dancer and choreographer Michio Ito, a battle-mad soldier, the Minotaur. Giants of jazz accompany non-Western music as models and as topics; narrative and introspection go hand in hand. There’s even dry humor. Elegies and tributes to other senior poets—Galway Kinnell, Mahmoud Darwish, Derek Walcott—seem friendly and unforced, but unsurprising: what sticks around are the stranger, less famous figures who populate most of the book, brought to life in Komunyakaa’s precarious, lively lines. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Probably my favorite living poet. No one else taught me more about how important it was to think about how words make people feel. It's not enough for people to know something is true. They have to feel it's true.

The New York Times Style Magazine - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Yusef Komunyakaa is one of our period's most significant and individual voices . . . He has a near-revelatory capacity to give himself over to his subject matter and to the taut concision of his free verse . . . Dazzling.

Poetry on Yusef Komunyakaa David Wojahn