Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems - Tapa dura

"Komunyakaa's poems sway with jazz-inflected rhythms. Short lines and percussive internal rhymes combine with sinuously stepped enjambment to give the poems a strongly musical movement." --Ian Tromp, Times Literary Supplement "Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Komunyakaa's second book in less than a year attests to the protean nature of his poetic imagination and skills, his fluent creative energy, and his passion for living the examined life . . . Komunyakaa is emerging as one of the major American poets of our time."--Booklist "Pleasure Dome is substantial, a comprehensive look at a significant poet's impressive career. Regular readers of Komunyakaa will find much of interest here--the book begins with a healthy selection of new poems, followed by a book-length group of the poet's early, uncollected work. ...a book impressive in its scope and volume, the life's work, thus far, of one of America's finer poets."--Virginia Quarterly Review "Komunyakaa certainly deserves this valedictory volume . . . [The new work] is really almost a short collection's worth of material. It's reminiscent of 1998's Thieves of Paradise with its heady mix of gothic foreboding, racial history and realpolitick, biblical and Attic allusion, and sexual longing . . . Most readers will want this book for its alternatingly erudite and feral energy and its truth-telling about Vietnam (see Dien Cai Dau and others) and America."-- Publishers Weekly

Best known for Neon Vernacular, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1994, and for Dien Cai Dau, a collection of poems chronicling his experiences as a journalist in Vietnam, Yusef Komunyakaa has become one of America's most compelling poets. Pleasure Dome gathers the poems in these two distinguished books and five others--over two and a half decades of Komunyakaa's work. In addition, Pleasure Dome includes 25 early, uncollected poems and a rich selection of 18 new poems.