Dien Cai Dau
4.5/5
()
About this ebook
This collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet is “a major contribution to the body of literature grappling with Vietnam” (Poetry).
Yusef Komunyakaa is renowned for his ability to blend memory and history with strikingly evocative poetic imagery. Born in the rural community of Bogalusa, Louisiana, Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent and editor of The Southern Cross and received a Bronze Star for his service as a journalist. In Dien Cai Dau, he applies this unique sensibility to his experience of the Vietnam War. The resulting poems have been called some of the finest Vietnam testimony ever documented in verse or prose.
“So finely tuned are Komunyakaa’s images, so faultless his vision, that the reader sees precisely what the poet recalls . . . A powerful must-read for those who have forgotten those days.” ―BooklistYusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poems include Warhorses (FSG, 2008), Taboo (FSG, 2004), and Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. He teaches at New York University.
Read more from Yusef Komunyakaa
Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Blue House: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNeon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best American Poetry 2003: Series Editor David Lehman Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cusp: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Night Animals Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Related to Dien Cai Dau
Related ebooks
By the Time You Read This: Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTo Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Hysterical Water: Poems Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Flies Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sum of Her Parts: Essays Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThree Bell Zero Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWild Geese Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Vindication of the Rights of Woman Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHot with the Bad Things Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Paradise, Nevada Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFlourish Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Past Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Thrall: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Picture of Dorian Gray Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIncrease Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Time As We Are Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingstheMystery.doc: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Love Information: Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStranger in the Mask of a Deer Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStanding in the Forest of Being Alive Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fracture: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Useful Junk Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuartet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5There Are Not Enough Sad Songs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The World Doesn't End: A Poetry Collection Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sentences and Rain Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Poetry For You
Dante's Divine Comedy: Inferno Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Inward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad: The Fitzgerald Translation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Sun and Her Flowers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey: (The Stephen Mitchell Translation) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Gilgamesh: A New English Version Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Prophet Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Canterbury Tales Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tao Te Ching: A New English Version Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Way Forward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Bell Jar: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Iliad of Homer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Beowulf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dante's Inferno: The Divine Comedy, Book One Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Leaves of Grass: 1855 Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pretty Boys Are Poisonous: Poems Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Daily Stoic: A Daily Journal On Meditation, Stoicism, Wisdom and Philosophy to Improve Your Life Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Beyond Thoughts: An Exploration Of Who We Are Beyond Our Minds Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Love Her Wild: Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Odyssey Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBedtime Stories for Grown-ups Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Road Not Taken and other Selected Poems Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Twenty love poems and a song of despair Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Dien Cai Dau
30 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Dien Cai Dau is the best collection of war poetry I have ever read. I don't know if the relative immediacy of the Vietnam War, and the unquestionable importance that war had for the generation just ahead of me, predisposes me to be drawn to this collection, or not. I do know the collection as a collection is truly beautiful and haunting. Overall, I really like and respect Komunyakaa's body of work, and believe this collection to be his absolute finest. And Komunyakaa's "Facing It" (a poem in this collection) has few rivals among the staggering number of free verse English poems ever written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Fantastic war poetry, mostly dealing with the author's experience in Vietnam.
Book preview
Dien Cai Dau - Yusef Komunyakaa
Camouflaging the Chimera
We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,
blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird’s target.
We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts
from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
reaching in from America.
We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds.
In our way station of shadows
rock apes tried to blow our cover,
throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons
crawled our spines, changing from day
to night: green to gold,
gold to black. But we waited
till the moon touched metal,
till something almost broke
inside us. VC struggled
with the hillside, like black silk
wrestling iron through grass.
We weren’t there. The river ran
through our bones. Small animals took refuge
against our bodies; we held our breath,
ready to spring the L-shaped
ambush, as a world revolved
under each man’s eyelid.
Tunnels
Crawling down headfirst into the hole,
he kicks the air & disappears.
I feel like I’m down there
with him, moving ahead, pushed
by a river of darkness, feeling
blessed for each inch of the unknown.
Our tunnel rat is the smallest man
in the platoon, in an echo chamber
that makes his ears bleed
when he pulls the trigger.
He moves as if trying to outdo
blind fish easing toward imagined blue,
pulled by something greater than life’s
ambitions. He can’t think about
spiders & scorpions mending the air,
or care about bats upside down
like gods in the mole’s blackness.
The damp smell goes deeper
than the stench of honey buckets.
A web of booby traps waits, ready
to spring into broken stars.
Forced onward by some need,
some urge, he knows the pulse
of mysteries & diversions
like thoughts trapped in the ground.
He questions each root.
Every cornered shadow has a life
to bargain with. Like an angel
pushed up against what hurts,
his globe-shaped helmet
follows the gold ring his flashlight
casts into the void. Through silver
lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence,
he goes, the good soldier,
on hands & knees, tunneling past
death sacked into a blind corner,
loving the weight of the shotgun
that will someday dig his grave.
Somewhere Near Phu Bai
The moon cuts through
night trees like a circular saw
white hot. In the guard