Thieves of Paradise.

• Author: Brouwer, Joel

In his first book since winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, Yusef Komunyakaa shows no signs of resting on his laurels. These complex and richly detailed poems cover a tremendous emotional range, from the joy of childhood memories ("Mumble Peg") to the devastation of a runaway slave who chooses to murder her child rather than allow him to be recaptured ("Modern Medea"). But the entire collection is unified by Komunyakaa's compassion for all who have been robbed by the "thieves of paradise." The reproduction of Benjamin West's painting Penn's Treaty With the Indians on the dust jacket suggests one specific way to read the book's title, but other thefts are chronicled here also: soldiers robbed by war, cultures robbed by colonizers, nature robbed by poachers.

Komunyakaa has always placed his highly personal poems in specific social and historical contexts. As a result, his work is simultaneously intimate and universal. "You need to have both," Komunyakaa once told an interviewer, "the odyssey outward as well as inward, to have any kind of constructive, informative bridges to vision and expression." In earlier collections--most notably Dien Cai Dau, about his experiences in the Vietnam War, and Magic City, about growing up in the Ku Klux Klan stronghold of Bogalusa, Louisiana--Komunyakaa's autobiography was in the forefront, and history functioned as backdrop. In Thieves of Paradise, the balance has tipped somewhat; many of these poems are meditations on historical events with a dash of the personal, rather than vice versa.

"Quatrains for Ishi," for example, is a long poem addressed to the last full-blooded Yahi Indian, who was captured in California in 1911 and held in captivity at San Francisco's Museum of Anthropology until his death five years later. Komunyakaa conjures the scene in vivid detail, and with great sympathy:

Back in your world of leaves,

you journey ten thousand miles

in a circle, hunted for years

inside the heart.

But the poet recognizes the danger in comparing Ishi's sorrow to his own: "I know if I think of you/as me, you'll disappear."

As is often the case with the poems of Michael S. Harper, Komunyakaa's near-contemporary (and fellow jazz fan), the abundant references to history, geography, and mythology in Thieves of Paradise can sometimes leave the reader feeling a bit at sea. When a poem like "Wet Nurse" begins with the lines

The shadow of a hilltop

halves an acropolis

in the...