THE ANTHOLOGIST SINCE 1927 THE LITERARY AND FINE ARTS JOURNAL OF RUTGERS COLLEGE R E V I E W Talking Dirty to the Gods By Yusef Komunyakaa [2000] Farrar, Straus & Giroux 144 pp. $13.00 Review by Erik Kennedy Critics talk about Yusef Komunyakaa's "mournful surrealism" as if it were not a handicap. And they're right; it genuinely isn't. This says a good deal for Komunyakaa indeed, for surrealism can be a serious impediment to pleasure; what I call the 'silly surrealism' of John Ashbery and James Tate forces me not to tolerate them. The greatest problem with Komunyakaa's poems, if there is one, is not their opacity-for, like Berryman's poems, a glorious sense can always be made of them-but wrestling with their learning. I wish I could say I always knew well who or what Komunyakaa was talking about: it's not every poet who writes verses about Stesichorus of Himera, a lyric poet from the dim mists of the Sicilian Greek past, Lady Xoc, a Mayan queen who gashed her tongue open as an offering to the gods to relieve famine, and the homunculus, that self-in-miniature believed to live inside us by the early biologists, among other things. For all this, though, Komunyakaa is never impossible, even if he's sometimes as unrestrainable as a Jamaican bus driver. Talking Dirty to the Gods is a series of 132 poems of four loose quatrains each and, more often than not, Komunyakaa uses this loose, easy form to write poems of rich charm. The best of these are naturally the bawdy ones like "Lust," "Body of a Woman," and "Chastity Belt," a poem about the "master of the keys" for the chastity belt and his unfortunate death after he ravishes the belted maiden. We cry out, of course, Is the "master of the keys" the maiden's master, or a leering locksmith, poking where he shouldn't, ended for his lust? We can't know. This is bawdry with mystery. It's sort of surprising that the Goddess of Fellatio doesn't make an appearance in these poems, for Komunyakaa's pantheon of personal gods includes many of his own devising, and many things that become divine in his hands. There is the God of Variables, yes, but also the God of Landmines, the Goddess of Quotas and "Utetheisa Ornatrix, the First Goddess." The divinity poems are generally successful, especially given their challenges, but the poems to famous persons (which, it must be said, fairly clutter the volume) are not usually so fortunate. Perhaps the unique problems of writing history are too much for Komunyakaa or maybe they are simply too serious for the brief lyric to adjudicate them. In any case, these poems to Stalin, Remus and Romulus (yes, the murdered brother first), Isaac, Sylvia Plath, Chet Baker, Phocylides of Miletus, Jean Genet, etc. have trouble doing much more than narrating stories that we might not always be interested in hearing for their own sakes, especially not when reading poems. Talking Dirty to the Gods is a collection that indulges in the fetishes of its author but, fortunately, whose curious and wondrous lyric voice, at least, is indestructible