AMERICAN SMOOTH
By Rita Dove. Norton. 143 pp. $22.95
TABOO
The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One
By Yusef Komunyakaa
Farrar Straus Giroux. 132 pp. $20
Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa are important, Pulitzer Prize -winning poets; they are also African Americans. While the last fact may not be the ultimate determinant of their poetic destinies, it has definitely influenced their points of view. Both poets, too, are historically minded. They draw from a fountain of cultural, historical and literary references to describe, depict and versify their personal experiences. Their cultural references are universal -- their personal experiences are often rooted in black male or female identity. Dove and Komunyakaa are simultaneously representatives of their respective sexes, African Americans, Americans and -- because culture is a treasure open to all -- citizens of the world.
Their most recent books, Dove's American Smooth and Komunyakaa's Taboo, provide a study in the pleasures of a miniaturist volume versus those of a large-scale project, an intimate performance in contrast to a symphony. Dove has a reputation as a literary chanteuse, an essentially lyrical poet in a variety of modes -- classical, and allusive, jazzy and informal. Her title refers to "A form of ballroom dancing . . . in which the partners are free to release each other from the closed embrace and dance without any physical contact, thus permitting improvisation and individual expression." The formal/informal rhythms of this manner of dancing describe Dove's poetic strategies. Sometimes energy is compacted and controlled; at other times energy is released, a note is stretched peculiarly long or stutters breathlessly short with a skillful understanding of poetic tension. American Smooth opens in the classical mode with "All Souls'," in which Adam and Eve, have been naming the animals. Their perfect union is already (the shadowy language suggests) imperfect.
Starting up behind them,
all the voices of those they had named:
mink, gander, and marmoset,
crow and cockatiel.
Even the duckbilled platypus . . .
Of course, the world had changed
