Taboo: The Wishbone Trilogy, Part One; Poems

The Paint-Box artists
color in Adam & Eve,
using every hue & cry

of temptation. Because God
blends into the darkness
the faces keep coming off.
–from “Chiaroscuro”

With the allusive leaps and improvisational chops of a jazz soloist, Yusef Komunyakaa is our great poet of connectivity–the secret blood that links slave and master, explorer and native, stranger and brother. In Taboo he examines the role of blacks in Western history, and how these roles are portrayed in art and literature. In taut, meticulously crafted three-line stanzas, Rubens paints his wife looking longingly at a black servant; Aphra Behn writes Oroonoko “as if she’d rehearsed it/for years in her spleen”; and in Monticello, Thomas Jefferson is “still at his neo-classical desk/musing, but we know his mind/is brushing aside abstractions/so his hands can touch flesh.” Taboo is the powerful first book in a new trilogy by a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose work never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.