What do you think?
Rate this book
The Emperor of Water Clocks
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. But Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the beguiling guises Komunyakaa dons over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here he is with Napoleon, as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; here he is at the circus, observing as "The strong man presses six hundred pounds, / his muscles flexed for the woman / whose T-shirt says, these guns are loaded"; and here is just a man, placing "a few red anemones / & a sheaf of wheat" on Mahmoud Darwish's grave, reflecting on why "I'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 of, say, 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.
"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. But Ulysses (or his half brother) is but one of the beguiling guises Komunyakaa dons over the course of this densely lyrical book. Here his speaker observes a doomed court jester; here he is with Napoleon, as the emperor "tells the doctor to cut out his heart / & send it to the empress, Marie-Louise"; here he is at the circus, observing as "The strong man presses six hundred pounds, / his muscles flexed for the woman / whose T-shirt says, these guns are loaded"; and here is just a man, placing "a few red anemones / & a sheaf of wheat" on Mahmoud Darwish's grave, reflecting on why "I'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 of, say, 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.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2015
9 people are currently reading
520 people want to read
About the author
Yusef Komunyakaa
95 books205 followersYusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world.
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
(from Wikipedia)
His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
January 24, 2025
I don’t read a lot of poetry. I make this admission with a sense of guilt, one borne out of the fact that I generally consider myself a very sophisticated reader, one who probably should be reading a lot more poetry.
I blame the culture I live in. (It’s much easier than blaming myself, and culture is always a good stand-by culprit for which to assess blame, after parents, too much TV, and drugs.)
You have to admit, we live in a culture that doesn’t really appreciate poetry, outside of very small academic circles and poetry writing workshops. National Poetry Month just recently flew by with little to no fanfare.
Our education system doesn’t do a great job instilling love of poetry in students. To be fair, though, our education system doesn’t do a great job at anything anymore, let alone instilling love of any subject matter in students. Schools today are pretty much designed to instill chronic apathy in students.
The truth is, I don’t read a lot of poetry because of the bullshit way that I was taught to read poetry: dissect, deconstruct, dig for meaning. Basically, the way kids are taught to read poetry in schools anymore is to basically destroy the beauty of poetry and the love of language.
Thankfully, in the last decade, I have tried to un-learn what I learned about reading poetry. I have begun to read poetry the same way that I learned to read, and love, fiction: for pleasure. Not that some literary analysis isn’t always necessary or appropriate. I’m one of those weird literary geeks who actually enjoys analyzing everything I read, whether it’s Leo Tolstoy, Stephen King, or the latest Star Wars novel.
In my (limited) experience as a high school English teacher, I had the pleasure of teaching a unit on poetry to 9th grade students. I remember incorporating song lyrics into the unit, seeing the surprise from students who had never thought that the songs they listen to by My Chemical Romance or 50 Cent or Taylor Swift could be considered poetry. I remember having students read poems by Langston Hughes and Dylan Thomas and Nikki Giovanni and Robert Frost, aloud, not necessarily for the meaning of the poem but just to listen to the beauty of the language, the way the poets put the words together to make sibilance, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, meter.
I wanted to inculcate the idea (an antithetical one to the way that I was taught) that poetry should be read for pleasure and that it’s okay to find meaning in it but that shouldn’t be the be-all-and-end-all of reading a poem. I wanted them to understand that it’s okay if they didn’t necessarily “get” a poem, because a poem could have many different meanings to many different people.
I’ll be honest, it’s taken me a long time to figure all this out myself, and my appreciation for poetry has grown exponentially as a result, but I still, sadly, don’t read a lot of poetry.
In my poetry unit, as a teacher, I introduced the class to a short poem by Billy Collins, entitled “Introduction to Poetry”, which is so good that I’ll just include it here, in its entirety:
“I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.”
To me, the last two stanzas say just about everything about how poetry has been taught and, in some cases, how it is still being taught in classrooms today.
I picked up Yusef Komunyakaa’s latest book of poetry, “The Emperor of Water Clocks” on a complete whim at the library. I had never even heard of Komunyakaa, despite the fact that he is a Pulitzer Prize winner and that he has roughly 17 other books published.
He is a teacher at New York University, and I can only imagine that his students love his approach to reading poetry, if reading his poetry is any indication.
I’ll be honest: I don’t “get” a lot of the poetry in this book. It is full of surreal imagery and Greek and Roman mythological references and historical events and pop cultural references, especially in regards to jazz and blues music. I admit that I don’t “get” a lot of the references.
That’s okay, though, because the beauty of the language is what makes this a great book of poetry.
There were many times that a line or stanza simply knocked me out with its beauty. Examples:
(from “The Water Clock”): “A lifetime poises in my fingers on the silver clasp of your bra/as spring’s rapaciousness nears. Your slip drops to the floor/& ripples at our feet as a blooming cereus opens./All the sweet mechanics cleave heaven & earth,/& a pinhole drops seconds through bronze.” (p.7)
I admit, I had to google “water clocks” for this one, finding out that water clocks are the oldest forms of timepieces in the world. Also called clepsydras, water clocks measured time based on regulated flow of liquids into or out of a receptacle. The poem makes a lot more sense with that knowledge, but even without it, it’s a damn sexy poem.
(from “Dear Pandora”): “Honey,/you know, to tell you the truth,/I think I love your labyrinth.” (p.50)
I know the basic story of Pandora, the Greek myth of the first human woman created by the gods who opened up a forbidden box that unleashed all the world’s evils, parallelling the Judeo-Christian myth of Eve and the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This line, besides making me chuckle, is just profound as hell.
(from “The Day I saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems”): “The President of the United States of America/thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie/to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus/for its ink, how a man’s skin becomes the final page.” (p. 86)
Several of Komunyakaa’s poems are about race and racism (Komunyakaa is black, by the way), and like the best of poets, he says a lot with few words. Derek Walcott is another Pulitzer Prize-winning black poet from the island of Trinidad.
Every poem in this book is delicious. If you’re like me, and you don’t read a lot of poetry and, in fact, aren’t sure if you like poetry, I challenge you to go to the library and pick up a book of poetry---any book---and check it out.
I blame the culture I live in. (It’s much easier than blaming myself, and culture is always a good stand-by culprit for which to assess blame, after parents, too much TV, and drugs.)
You have to admit, we live in a culture that doesn’t really appreciate poetry, outside of very small academic circles and poetry writing workshops. National Poetry Month just recently flew by with little to no fanfare.
Our education system doesn’t do a great job instilling love of poetry in students. To be fair, though, our education system doesn’t do a great job at anything anymore, let alone instilling love of any subject matter in students. Schools today are pretty much designed to instill chronic apathy in students.
The truth is, I don’t read a lot of poetry because of the bullshit way that I was taught to read poetry: dissect, deconstruct, dig for meaning. Basically, the way kids are taught to read poetry in schools anymore is to basically destroy the beauty of poetry and the love of language.
Thankfully, in the last decade, I have tried to un-learn what I learned about reading poetry. I have begun to read poetry the same way that I learned to read, and love, fiction: for pleasure. Not that some literary analysis isn’t always necessary or appropriate. I’m one of those weird literary geeks who actually enjoys analyzing everything I read, whether it’s Leo Tolstoy, Stephen King, or the latest Star Wars novel.
In my (limited) experience as a high school English teacher, I had the pleasure of teaching a unit on poetry to 9th grade students. I remember incorporating song lyrics into the unit, seeing the surprise from students who had never thought that the songs they listen to by My Chemical Romance or 50 Cent or Taylor Swift could be considered poetry. I remember having students read poems by Langston Hughes and Dylan Thomas and Nikki Giovanni and Robert Frost, aloud, not necessarily for the meaning of the poem but just to listen to the beauty of the language, the way the poets put the words together to make sibilance, alliteration, assonance, rhythm, meter.
I wanted to inculcate the idea (an antithetical one to the way that I was taught) that poetry should be read for pleasure and that it’s okay to find meaning in it but that shouldn’t be the be-all-and-end-all of reading a poem. I wanted them to understand that it’s okay if they didn’t necessarily “get” a poem, because a poem could have many different meanings to many different people.
I’ll be honest, it’s taken me a long time to figure all this out myself, and my appreciation for poetry has grown exponentially as a result, but I still, sadly, don’t read a lot of poetry.
In my poetry unit, as a teacher, I introduced the class to a short poem by Billy Collins, entitled “Introduction to Poetry”, which is so good that I’ll just include it here, in its entirety:
“I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.”
To me, the last two stanzas say just about everything about how poetry has been taught and, in some cases, how it is still being taught in classrooms today.
I picked up Yusef Komunyakaa’s latest book of poetry, “The Emperor of Water Clocks” on a complete whim at the library. I had never even heard of Komunyakaa, despite the fact that he is a Pulitzer Prize winner and that he has roughly 17 other books published.
He is a teacher at New York University, and I can only imagine that his students love his approach to reading poetry, if reading his poetry is any indication.
I’ll be honest: I don’t “get” a lot of the poetry in this book. It is full of surreal imagery and Greek and Roman mythological references and historical events and pop cultural references, especially in regards to jazz and blues music. I admit that I don’t “get” a lot of the references.
That’s okay, though, because the beauty of the language is what makes this a great book of poetry.
There were many times that a line or stanza simply knocked me out with its beauty. Examples:
(from “The Water Clock”): “A lifetime poises in my fingers on the silver clasp of your bra/as spring’s rapaciousness nears. Your slip drops to the floor/& ripples at our feet as a blooming cereus opens./All the sweet mechanics cleave heaven & earth,/& a pinhole drops seconds through bronze.” (p.7)
I admit, I had to google “water clocks” for this one, finding out that water clocks are the oldest forms of timepieces in the world. Also called clepsydras, water clocks measured time based on regulated flow of liquids into or out of a receptacle. The poem makes a lot more sense with that knowledge, but even without it, it’s a damn sexy poem.
(from “Dear Pandora”): “Honey,/you know, to tell you the truth,/I think I love your labyrinth.” (p.50)
I know the basic story of Pandora, the Greek myth of the first human woman created by the gods who opened up a forbidden box that unleashed all the world’s evils, parallelling the Judeo-Christian myth of Eve and the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This line, besides making me chuckle, is just profound as hell.
(from “The Day I saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott’s Collected Poems”): “The President of the United States of America/thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie/to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus/for its ink, how a man’s skin becomes the final page.” (p. 86)
Several of Komunyakaa’s poems are about race and racism (Komunyakaa is black, by the way), and like the best of poets, he says a lot with few words. Derek Walcott is another Pulitzer Prize-winning black poet from the island of Trinidad.
Every poem in this book is delicious. If you’re like me, and you don’t read a lot of poetry and, in fact, aren’t sure if you like poetry, I challenge you to go to the library and pick up a book of poetry---any book---and check it out.
April 16, 2021
Rich in allusions to history, myth, and jazz, this book roams from Ulysses to Catherine the Great to Napoleon to Bob Marley. The diction is dense and economical, and Komunyakaa mixes it up by going back and forth in time.
Though I've read individual poems by him, I admit this is the first full collection I've jumped into. No doubt it won't be the last. I want to dive deeper into his numerous works after this. Here's an example of a poem that spoke to me in an odd way:
A Prayer
Great Ooga-Booga, in your golden pavilion
beside the dung heap, please
don't let me die in a public place.
I still see the man on the café floor
at the airport beneath a canopy
of fluorescence, somewhere
in the Midwest or back East,
travelers walking around him
& texting on cell phones
while someone shocked him back,
fiddling with dials & buttons
on a miraculous instrument.
Was the memory of a dress in his head?
Great Ooga-Booga, forgive me
for wearing out my tongue before
I said your praises. No, I haven't
mastered the didgeridoo.
I don't have an epic as a bribe.
My words are simple. Please
don't let me die gazing up at a streetlight
or the Grand Central facades.
Let me go to my fishing hole
an hour before the sun sinks
into the deep woods, or swing
on the front porch, higher & higher
till I'm walking on the ceiling.
Maybe this appeals to me because I recall seeing videos of Bill Nye the Science Guy collapsing on a stage during a live talk. Instead of rushing to his aid, audience members quickly filmed and uploaded, trying to be the first to hit the Internet with the news along with video to gawk at.
"Please / don't let me die in a public place," indeed. Not among the damned human race, please.
Though I've read individual poems by him, I admit this is the first full collection I've jumped into. No doubt it won't be the last. I want to dive deeper into his numerous works after this. Here's an example of a poem that spoke to me in an odd way:
A Prayer
Great Ooga-Booga, in your golden pavilion
beside the dung heap, please
don't let me die in a public place.
I still see the man on the café floor
at the airport beneath a canopy
of fluorescence, somewhere
in the Midwest or back East,
travelers walking around him
& texting on cell phones
while someone shocked him back,
fiddling with dials & buttons
on a miraculous instrument.
Was the memory of a dress in his head?
Great Ooga-Booga, forgive me
for wearing out my tongue before
I said your praises. No, I haven't
mastered the didgeridoo.
I don't have an epic as a bribe.
My words are simple. Please
don't let me die gazing up at a streetlight
or the Grand Central facades.
Let me go to my fishing hole
an hour before the sun sinks
into the deep woods, or swing
on the front porch, higher & higher
till I'm walking on the ceiling.
Maybe this appeals to me because I recall seeing videos of Bill Nye the Science Guy collapsing on a stage during a live talk. Instead of rushing to his aid, audience members quickly filmed and uploaded, trying to be the first to hit the Internet with the news along with video to gawk at.
"Please / don't let me die in a public place," indeed. Not among the damned human race, please.
March 10, 2016
Finally. Finally. Finally. A collection I actually enjoyed. My favorites were Rock Me, Mercy; The Relic; Et Tu Brutus?; Envoy to Palestine; Monolith; Torsion; and The Green Horse.
November 25, 2016
I'm a poet and a poetry minor and my taste is basically Yusef Komunyakaa now. Perfect blend of elegance and grittiness, real and surreal, ancient and modern. I fell so in love
April 7, 2017
Yusef's poems could take place in an hour glass, only the sand is flowing neither upwards nor downwards, but swirls in place, like a billow of millenniums, or decades. Or days, or hours. Even milliseconds, and every word would sound as breathtaking as the last.
I picked this up on a whim at a local bookstore because I liked the cover, which is just about the most sacrilegious statement I could think of when describing why I decided to read this book. I'd love to say I felt some overwhelming sense of urgency to unearth a treasure I'd longed for for a while, but it was simply that beautiful cover on the front which prompted me. But by god I'm glad I did! I haven't read any of Yusef's earlier works but I gather by unanimity his writing hasn't changed since his debut (almost forty years ago, I believe!) which is wonderful. It encourages me all the more to go out and seek his other titles.
The Emperor of Water Clocks is a beautifully layered multi-world where the past and present seem to seep together betwixt lusciously carved lines. Yusef picks his words like ripe cherries, which makes it all the more ravishing to read. His narratives take place in a myriad of settings and timelines, where one can find oneself conversing with emperors, dining with musicians, courting Pandora, or even fighting a war. Yusef's players can roam the ancient lands of ancestors or find themselves on a dancefloor "[as] ...a new feeling runs its live wire / through the air a few months before / James Dean fails to straighten out / a curve somewhere in California." (pg 60.) Some are noted actors with names carrying some weight, like the famed Michio Ito with his magical movements who probably stood still when he was forcefully carted back to Tokyo, others are simply observers admiring the beauteous landscape. Nevertheless, they all have a resounding story to tell, and Yusef tells it perfectly.
Now it's 3:20am and I need to sleep.
I picked this up on a whim at a local bookstore because I liked the cover, which is just about the most sacrilegious statement I could think of when describing why I decided to read this book. I'd love to say I felt some overwhelming sense of urgency to unearth a treasure I'd longed for for a while, but it was simply that beautiful cover on the front which prompted me. But by god I'm glad I did! I haven't read any of Yusef's earlier works but I gather by unanimity his writing hasn't changed since his debut (almost forty years ago, I believe!) which is wonderful. It encourages me all the more to go out and seek his other titles.
The Emperor of Water Clocks is a beautifully layered multi-world where the past and present seem to seep together betwixt lusciously carved lines. Yusef picks his words like ripe cherries, which makes it all the more ravishing to read. His narratives take place in a myriad of settings and timelines, where one can find oneself conversing with emperors, dining with musicians, courting Pandora, or even fighting a war. Yusef's players can roam the ancient lands of ancestors or find themselves on a dancefloor "[as] ...a new feeling runs its live wire / through the air a few months before / James Dean fails to straighten out / a curve somewhere in California." (pg 60.) Some are noted actors with names carrying some weight, like the famed Michio Ito with his magical movements who probably stood still when he was forcefully carted back to Tokyo, others are simply observers admiring the beauteous landscape. Nevertheless, they all have a resounding story to tell, and Yusef tells it perfectly.
Now it's 3:20am and I need to sleep.
July 29, 2017
There is so much to love about "The Emperor of Water Clocks", though perhaps my favourite was the blend of the fantastical and the real. Poems like "The Emperor" were little treasures to read and twirl in the hands, each angle offering something exciting. I was impressed particularly the way Komunyakaa was able to switch gears in many of the poems but never lose that original atmosphere he set up within the first few lines. His poems make plot feel like an integral plot of poetry, though so many pieces often choose to focus on the driving emotional edge in a situation. The feeling of unity and mastery is both powerful and humble, inviting and in control.
December 18, 2021
All time coexists in the moment for Komunyakaa who can nod unaffectedly to Joseph Brodsky and Ivan the Terrible in on poem ("Caffe Reggio") and Pussy Riot and Victor Hugo in another ("Monolith"), as if antiquity weren't the past so much as a layer of the present. Similarly, his geographical placement can effortlessly hop from Turkey to Russia to the Arctic Circle to the Field of Mars ("Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova") for his is a surreal landscape for the global citizen reflecting on a living history.
March 9, 2017
The best 10-12 poems in this collection meet (or at least come close to) the supernaturally high standards Yusef Komunyakaa set for himself in Copacetic, I Apologize for the Eyes in My Heve, Magic City and Dien Cai Dau. Komunyakaa has an unerring sense of rhythm and some of his images are still echoing around in my skull thirty years after I first encountered them. A sample from "Sprung Rhythm of a Landscape":
I, too, know my Hopkins (Lightnin' & Gerard Manley),
gigging to this after-hours when all our little civil wars
unheal in the body. I shke my head till snake eyes fall
on the ground, as history climbs into her singing skull
to ride shotgun. Our days shaped by unseen movement
in the landscape, cold-cocked by brightness coming
over a hill, wild & steady as a palomino runagate
spooked by something in the trees unsaid
The lyrical descens in "The King's Salt," "Skulking Across Snow," "Longitudes," "Dead Reckoning" and the Herbie Hancock call-and-response in "Empryean Isles" explore places you don't get to any other way. "Interrogation," "Precious Metals," "Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova," "Turner's Great Tussle with Water" and "The Water Clock" are nearly as good.
At the same time, the collection reminded me of the parts of Komunyakaa's more recent volumes that felt flatter (never shallow--just not as textured?). He's developed a bit of a tendency to deflect the (I hesitate to use the word, but what the hell) *personal* (or maybe *lyrical* in the technical sense) dimensions into historical personae and situations. It may be that I'm just not visualizing/locating those poems right (which would explain why the ones with musical references--Night in Tunisia, the Oud, Hancock--speak to me more clearly.
Probably not the place to start with Komunyakaa, but if you're familiar with the earlier collected volume Neon Vernacular and Thieves of Paradise, this would probably be next.
I, too, know my Hopkins (Lightnin' & Gerard Manley),
gigging to this after-hours when all our little civil wars
unheal in the body. I shke my head till snake eyes fall
on the ground, as history climbs into her singing skull
to ride shotgun. Our days shaped by unseen movement
in the landscape, cold-cocked by brightness coming
over a hill, wild & steady as a palomino runagate
spooked by something in the trees unsaid
The lyrical descens in "The King's Salt," "Skulking Across Snow," "Longitudes," "Dead Reckoning" and the Herbie Hancock call-and-response in "Empryean Isles" explore places you don't get to any other way. "Interrogation," "Precious Metals," "Daytime Begins with a Line by Anna Akhmatova," "Turner's Great Tussle with Water" and "The Water Clock" are nearly as good.
At the same time, the collection reminded me of the parts of Komunyakaa's more recent volumes that felt flatter (never shallow--just not as textured?). He's developed a bit of a tendency to deflect the (I hesitate to use the word, but what the hell) *personal* (or maybe *lyrical* in the technical sense) dimensions into historical personae and situations. It may be that I'm just not visualizing/locating those poems right (which would explain why the ones with musical references--Night in Tunisia, the Oud, Hancock--speak to me more clearly.
Probably not the place to start with Komunyakaa, but if you're familiar with the earlier collected volume Neon Vernacular and Thieves of Paradise, this would probably be next.
May 21, 2017
In a world where the collected Tumblr memes of teenage girls dominate the Amazon poetry bestsellers list, it was both a relief and a thrill to dig into a book of – for lack of a better word – real poetry: the fifteenth and most recent collection by Pulitzer Prize winner Yusef Komunyakaa. Substantive, authoritative, and downright meaty, the fifty-eight pieces in
The Emperor of Water Clocks
cross time and space for their references and metaphors, which range from J. M. W. Turner's death-tinged paintings of slave ships battered at sea to the virtues of the oud, a near-Eastern lute, from the events of Ferguson, MO to the jazz music of Herbie Hancock.
Sometimes having to Google something every other page while reading feels disruptive and annoying, but in the case of good poetry, where you just know that understanding the basics of an unfamiliar topic will exponentially increase your enjoyment of the poem before you, I feel like the research is more of a seamless part of my reading experience rather than a tangent that takes me out of the moment. Thanks to Professor Komunyakaa, I learned about influential mid-twentieth-century Japanese-American dancer and choreographer Michio Ito, who helped shape modern dance in the US, and was then placed in an internment camp upon the outbreak of WWII before being deported for his trouble. I discovered the Russian modernist poet Anna Anhmatova, who worked under surveillance and censorship by Stalin yet refused to emigrate, even as her romantic partners were being executed by the government. And I found out that President Obama read Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, and why that was important. And in each of these cases (and there were plenty more!), after I read the Wikipedia or other standardized explanatory blurb, I got to see the topic/person/event in a whole new light: Komunyakaa's colorful, lovingly-rendered, evocative painting of words. After having read some current, utterly awful "poetry" of late, these poems were each such a gift that I rationed myself only one or two a day, so that they'd last me a nice long time.
I will definitely be visiting more of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry; fortunately he has fourteen prior volumes!
I received a copy of this book via Goodreads Giveaways, courtesy of publisher Farrar, Straus and Firoux, in exchange for my honest feedback and review.
Sometimes having to Google something every other page while reading feels disruptive and annoying, but in the case of good poetry, where you just know that understanding the basics of an unfamiliar topic will exponentially increase your enjoyment of the poem before you, I feel like the research is more of a seamless part of my reading experience rather than a tangent that takes me out of the moment. Thanks to Professor Komunyakaa, I learned about influential mid-twentieth-century Japanese-American dancer and choreographer Michio Ito, who helped shape modern dance in the US, and was then placed in an internment camp upon the outbreak of WWII before being deported for his trouble. I discovered the Russian modernist poet Anna Anhmatova, who worked under surveillance and censorship by Stalin yet refused to emigrate, even as her romantic partners were being executed by the government. And I found out that President Obama read Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, and why that was important. And in each of these cases (and there were plenty more!), after I read the Wikipedia or other standardized explanatory blurb, I got to see the topic/person/event in a whole new light: Komunyakaa's colorful, lovingly-rendered, evocative painting of words. After having read some current, utterly awful "poetry" of late, these poems were each such a gift that I rationed myself only one or two a day, so that they'd last me a nice long time.
I will definitely be visiting more of Yusef Komunyakaa's poetry; fortunately he has fourteen prior volumes!
I received a copy of this book via Goodreads Giveaways, courtesy of publisher Farrar, Straus and Firoux, in exchange for my honest feedback and review.
December 3, 2015
So good! I'd never heard of Komunyakaa before, which seems crazy given he's won a Pulitzer. I discovered it accidentally -- it was listed on a NY Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2015, and I got very excited because I noticed a writer with my initials, which happens to be one of the categories I was stuck on in a reading challenge I've been working through w/ some friends this year (not a whole lotta "YKs" out there in the lit world, apparently). I highly recommend watching a couple videos of him reading his works out loud -- it helps lend his voice & rhythm to the writing. His poem "Facing It" is a good place to start, but any will do. His voice has been stuck in my head ever since. Very lovely -- I'll definitely be checking out more of his works.
May 11, 2016
Several poems I understood, and even loved, yet the majority of the work seems to hide behind allusive images. It's like symbolism put into action. Mind, I didn't analyze every poem by reading it through and through, so the images stuck well within sight.
From the poem "Lemons" : "Now, a whiny ghost ship rides nothing but its own oblivion.."
Oh one of those lines that makes me stop in my tracks.
"Lemons," "The Relic," "Et Tu, Brutus?" and "Interrogation" are my favorite poems in this collection.
From the poem "Lemons" : "Now, a whiny ghost ship rides nothing but its own oblivion.."
Oh one of those lines that makes me stop in my tracks.
"Lemons," "The Relic," "Et Tu, Brutus?" and "Interrogation" are my favorite poems in this collection.
April 7, 2016
The latest volume of poetry by this well-known writer that shines with
his cleverness, intelligence and international flavor both in subject and
location. Nearly magical at times, it is a serious pleasure to read. One poem
is a sensitive tribute to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. One is a
ghazal written after the Ferguson riots. Another one is for Charles Wright
called "Sprung Rhythm of a Landscape." Very worth one's while.
his cleverness, intelligence and international flavor both in subject and
location. Nearly magical at times, it is a serious pleasure to read. One poem
is a sensitive tribute to the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. One is a
ghazal written after the Ferguson riots. Another one is for Charles Wright
called "Sprung Rhythm of a Landscape." Very worth one's while.
January 31, 2016
Masterpieces of modern lyricism.
May 4, 2016
Library: 2015, Farrar Straus Giroux
Read: 5/02/2016, want to purchase
Read: 5/02/2016, want to purchase
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 12, 2016
Komunyakaa is a surrealist conjurer, magical realist master, blending medieval, mythological, and down on the corner scapes with a deft ear and an unrelenting eye.
Read
April 8, 2016811.54 K819e 2015
March 2, 2025
Amazing collection of poems from the always amazing Yusef Komunyakaa. Best poem in this collection is "Ghazal, After Ferguson" (easily in the top 10 or 20 poems I've ever read; I'm growing fond of ghazals lately) but other standout poems include: "Dead Reckoning", "Dead Reckoning II", "Krar", "Praise Be", "Latitudes", "Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash", "Il Duce's Villa", "The Land of Cockaigne" (easily in my top 50 poems I've ever read), "The Water Clock", "The Raven Master", "Lemons", "Turner's Great Tussle With Water", "Sperm Oil" (easily in my top 50 poems I've ever read), "Nocturnal Houses" (easily within the top 30 poems I've ever read), "The King" (easily within the top 100 poems I've ever read, and genuinely super memorable), "Augury at Sunset" (easily within the top 20 poems I've read, amazing command of imagery), "Skulking Across Snow", "Sprung Rhythm of a Language" (easily within the top 50 poems I've read), "Rock Me, Mercy", and "Islands". As you can see, many of my favorites come from part 1 or 3, as do many standouts that I recommend. I recommend this book highly if you're a Yusuf Komunyakaa fan and a big fan of jazz poetry and the occasional ghazal in general.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 27, 2018
My second time reading a collection of poems by current New York State poet Yusef Komunyakaa. As with the first, The Chameleon Couch, this was full of treasures. The first-third did not stir much inside of me, but the deeper I got into the collection the more beautiful and touching I found his words and images. Eager to reading more of his poetry.
Stand out poems for me were: "The Water Clock", "Lemons", "Turner's Great Tussle With Water", "Rock Me, Mercy" (in memory of the victims at Newtown), "Islands" (in celebration of the poet Derek Walcott), "Latitudes", "Et Tu, Brutus?", "Faces at the Window", "Transference & Bling", "Scrimmage" (the greatest poem I've read on the sport of football), "Torsion", "Longitudes", "Caffe Reggio", "The King", "The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems" (also in celebration of Walcott), "Monolith", and "Precious Metals", and "The Work of Orpheus".
Stand out poems for me were: "The Water Clock", "Lemons", "Turner's Great Tussle With Water", "Rock Me, Mercy" (in memory of the victims at Newtown), "Islands" (in celebration of the poet Derek Walcott), "Latitudes", "Et Tu, Brutus?", "Faces at the Window", "Transference & Bling", "Scrimmage" (the greatest poem I've read on the sport of football), "Torsion", "Longitudes", "Caffe Reggio", "The King", "The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems" (also in celebration of Walcott), "Monolith", and "Precious Metals", and "The Work of Orpheus".
September 11, 2025
Komunyakaa is one of our most important and accomplished U.S. poets. He is likely our greatest contemporary poet of war as well. I always learn something when reading him and this collection is no different. His typical gifts are all on display here: great imagery, well constructed lines, and a mostly serious diction and persona. But he can be funny too as in his poem "A Prayer" which begins: "Great Ooga-Booga, in your golden pavilion/beside the dung heap, please/don't let me die in a public place." But even his amusing work is stained with a hard-earned gravitas and deep learning in the classics. His poetic voice is already critical to the canon and is well deserved indeed. Read this book and perhaps you too will find yourself "a Eureka held up to the sun's blinding eye."
January 27, 2021
Too often lost in the poet’s obscure imagination: speaking to the dead, sleepwalking, pressing my nude body against the pages & trying to read something into the life of the speaker, nibbling at the edges of his nightmares, waking with the taste of death in my mouth, and yes, sometimes opening my eyes in the apparitional light of a poem to find myself lost in a field of hyacinth & jasmine in bloom.
Favorites:
“Skulking Across Snow”
“The Gold Pistol”
“Dear Pandora”
“Longitudes”
“The King”
Favorites:
“Skulking Across Snow”
“The Gold Pistol”
“Dear Pandora”
“Longitudes”
“The King”
Read
March 9, 2020Komunyakaa's The Emperor of Water Clocks takes the jazz-inspired rhythms and sensitivity that have made Komunyakaa famous and ascends into mythical, story-book realms to which he has never yet journeyed. In looking at the world through the lense of intricate fable, Yusef Komunyakaa renders our own world a little easier to see.
February 27, 2021
“When the trees were guilty, hugged up
to history & locked in a cross-brace
with Whitman's Louisiana live oak,
you went into that mossy weather.
Did you witness the shotguns at Angola
riding on horseback through the tall sway
of sugarcane, the glint of blue steel
in the blood-red strawberry fields?”
to history & locked in a cross-brace
with Whitman's Louisiana live oak,
you went into that mossy weather.
Did you witness the shotguns at Angola
riding on horseback through the tall sway
of sugarcane, the glint of blue steel
in the blood-red strawberry fields?”
September 26, 2019
The poet in this collection inhabits an array of voices to tell his stories. Erudite and full of classical myth in one, full of the dialect of jazz and blues in the next. A rich challenging collection.
August 24, 2022
Resonant and lovely. I was drawn to the book by the title, and I did not regret the time I spent with it. I read Neon Vernacular quite a few years back and it wasn't really my thing, but these poems settle into my heart and light my imagination on fire.
January 22, 2018
"...snow falling inside two minds."
February 20, 2020
The real deal. Reverie-provoking and often moving.
February 22, 2021
This may be my very favorite book of poetry---ever.
May 21, 2024
Beautiful writing with references to history, jazz, and natural beauty. I loved “Rock Me, Mercy” dedicated to the victims at Newton.
May 16, 2024
At Indiana University, I studied briefly with Yusef Komunyakaa when my introductory poetry writing portfolio gained me entrance into both three- and four-hundred-level classes. I hadn’t meant to be a poet, a small irony since picking it up again after a move to the Flint Hills of Kansas, and felt like a charlatan in classes (the other taught by David Wojahn) brimming with, so I assumed, aspiring professional poets.
After putting my pen down circa 1996 and not picking up again for 25 years, I learned something about my process that gave me so much anxiety back then: I don’t respond well to poetry prompts, which is what teaching the writing of poetry was all about. I hadn’t even done well in my introductory course until, in a fit of rewriting the weekend before my portfolio was due, I found my way into the poems not because of the instruction but despite it.
That’s not quite right. The instruction gave me the tools I needed to move beyond where I’d been when I arrived at the class, but the formal nature of poetry instruction—write about this subject or in this form and have it ready by Wednesday—is not how I was able to write freely then. Or now. Whether that means anything or not, as in, should a writer be able to write at any time and about anything, I can’t say. What I can say is that, despite my brief tenure with him, I have always maintained a curiosity about Komunyakaa’s work
This brings me to The Emperor of Water Clocks, the third of five books of poetry I picked up collectively from the library a few weeks ago. As with the others, there was no magic to selecting this volume; it was simply the one they had. I’ve come across Komunyakaa’s works several times at bookstores, but I’ve never resonated with the one or two poems randomly chosen to decide whether or not to spend the $5 or $8. This seemed the best way to give him a proper chance, even if, I suppose, it would have been to start with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular.
Across its 58 poems, The Emperor of Water Clocks covers a lot of territory: mythology, civil rights, music, politics, the personal, the casual observation, and everything in between. Komunyakaa has a gift for language, for conjuring images, and for a lyricism often too dense for my tastes. Many of the poems felt like they might have been inspired by the same prompts given to his students at New York University, where he still teaches, and, as such, titillated the senses but failed to land emotionally. That is, I can appreciate the skill and the craft, admire it and be intrigued by it even, without truly connecting with it. That’s not to say none of the poems hit the mark. Many did, especially as the book progressed, its journey seeming to go, in its way, from impersonal observation to personal experience. At least I finally scratched the itch. Now to find some David Wojahn.
After putting my pen down circa 1996 and not picking up again for 25 years, I learned something about my process that gave me so much anxiety back then: I don’t respond well to poetry prompts, which is what teaching the writing of poetry was all about. I hadn’t even done well in my introductory course until, in a fit of rewriting the weekend before my portfolio was due, I found my way into the poems not because of the instruction but despite it.
That’s not quite right. The instruction gave me the tools I needed to move beyond where I’d been when I arrived at the class, but the formal nature of poetry instruction—write about this subject or in this form and have it ready by Wednesday—is not how I was able to write freely then. Or now. Whether that means anything or not, as in, should a writer be able to write at any time and about anything, I can’t say. What I can say is that, despite my brief tenure with him, I have always maintained a curiosity about Komunyakaa’s work
This brings me to The Emperor of Water Clocks, the third of five books of poetry I picked up collectively from the library a few weeks ago. As with the others, there was no magic to selecting this volume; it was simply the one they had. I’ve come across Komunyakaa’s works several times at bookstores, but I’ve never resonated with the one or two poems randomly chosen to decide whether or not to spend the $5 or $8. This seemed the best way to give him a proper chance, even if, I suppose, it would have been to start with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Neon Vernacular.
Across its 58 poems, The Emperor of Water Clocks covers a lot of territory: mythology, civil rights, music, politics, the personal, the casual observation, and everything in between. Komunyakaa has a gift for language, for conjuring images, and for a lyricism often too dense for my tastes. Many of the poems felt like they might have been inspired by the same prompts given to his students at New York University, where he still teaches, and, as such, titillated the senses but failed to land emotionally. That is, I can appreciate the skill and the craft, admire it and be intrigued by it even, without truly connecting with it. That’s not to say none of the poems hit the mark. Many did, especially as the book progressed, its journey seeming to go, in its way, from impersonal observation to personal experience. At least I finally scratched the itch. Now to find some David Wojahn.
February 16, 2017
I received this book from Good Reads.
Excellent poetry. Its not something I read all the time, but I DO enjoy well written, thought provoking ones. This book does that.
Excellent poetry. Its not something I read all the time, but I DO enjoy well written, thought provoking ones. This book does that.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews