Essay On Facing It By Yusef Komunyakaa

This comparison reflects how tormented the speaker is about his memories because he wants to be strong like stone yet no one can go through a war, watch men die, some of whom were his friends, and not be tainted by the horrors death brings.As you read the poem you can also see that the speaker feels as if he should have also lost his life like the others and that he feels guilty that he made it out alive while others did not.

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In the second stanza of his poem “Sunday Afternoons,” for example, Komunyakaa layers simile upon simile to capture a couple’s confrontation with the unexpected consequence of their acting upon their sexual desires; one moment they “were drunk and brave as birds diving through saw vines” and the next moment they are counting “speckled eggs, blue as rage.” Dien Cai Dau First published: 1988 Type of work: Poetry are arranged to follow the trajectory of a single black soldier’s experience of the Vietnam conflict from the moment that he suddenly finds himself dropped in the middle of the action to his homecoming and subsequent visit to the war memorial in Washington, D. Komunyakaa’s initial military assignment in Vietnam consisted of frontline reporting.

In so many ways, his dual roles as eyewitness and journalist prepared him for the eventual task, long after the fact, of trying to make sense of an experience that may, in the final analysis, never be fully understood.

Another major feature of Komunyakaa’s style is what has been labeled his montage technique.

By this means, he builds many of his poems by superimposing one image upon another in order to create a single, complex, thematically related word picture.

The first poem in this volume, “Camouflaging the Chimera,” focuses on the soldier’s desire to blend into the landscape in order to conceal himself from the enemy and to carry out his murderous mission.

Essay On Facing It By Yusef Komunyakaa

Ciara Desmond In the poem “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, the speaker is remembering his experiences in the Vietnam War and all the soldiers whose lives were lost.

At the beginning of his poetic career, Komunyakaa’s vision was rooted most often in his race and gender, but even in his earliest work, there is evidence of his desire to incorporate the perspectives of other people.

This tendency to seek the universal expanded over time as Komunyakaa studied and traveled.

Indeed, the poet’s evolving vision became increasingly marked by a rich interplay of past and present, of the history and culture of the United States and those of other lands.

Very often Komunyakaa’s poetic inquiries into the nature of identity and experience are retrospective.