TALKING DIRTY TO THE GODS
by Yusef Komunyakaa
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
$23

With the name Yusef Komunyakaa and with the birthplace of Bogalusa, Louisiana, there is clear motive for this poet’s love of syllables. Even more so than his mound of previous work, the poems in Talking Dirty to the Gods all begin with the perfect arrangement of soundful, soulful syllables. Each poem is like eating an oyster, when you know better that really what you are eating is the soul of the ocean. Komunyakaa exonerates the smallest small of sound, where the soul of music remains in a word.

Anyone can write a great collection of syllables though, and that is what keeps the scholars guessing at what is masterful poetry and what is only the work of a hobby poet. In Komunyakaa’s work, the transformation from inorganic to organic is the definition of mastery. Each poem is built solidly, but at the end you aren’t gazing at something built, sturdy, standing perfectly still, but something unbuilt and chaotic and running fast, like a river.

With the title Talking Dirty to the Gods (the most exciting scholarly book title ever created) and poems called “Sex Toys,” “Nipples,” and “Slime Molds,” the book is a live river of taboo. Like a god tempting us with an apple, Komunyakaa titillates our desire for something dirty in our past. Collectively, the poems go further to suggest that the great human desire is to be the outlaw. In “The God of Variables Laments” the ending is this: “The god-forsaken moon is ours, too & you/Can’t teach wood not to worship fire.” PAULA GILOVICH

WHAT ARE YOU LIKE?
by Anne Enright
(Atlantic Monthly Press)
$24

The question asked in the title of Anne Enright’s novel is not meant, really, to be answered, but her characters think about it constantly. The novel begins with a birth and a death: Maria, “small for a monster, with the slightly hurt look that monsters have and babies share,” comes into the world as her mother, Anna, exits it, leaving daughter and her father, Berts, bewildered and destined to struggle with the shapeless sadness that such an event brings. Berts remarries and Maria eventually leaves Dublin for New York, but this sadness reverberates down through the years, creating the central axis around which the novel spins. Berts is the more pathetic of the two, letting his life beat him to a kind of pulp, but Maria is more aggressively unhappy, mildly mad, and eventually discovers that the facts of her past hide a secret; untangling it will bring her to the brink. The story crisscrosses time, jumping back and forth and around, with tiny echoes in the lives of the major and minor characters to show how fate ties us together. Similar emotional and familiar territory was covered more satisfyingly in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, but to be fair, this is a different sort of book. Its structure and sound have more in common with Enright’s famous fellow countryman’s Portrait of the Artist as Young Man–complicated emotional states cowering before the power of words–but without the steadying ground that Joyce used to anchor his characters. It’s a lovely read, but in the end the long journey brings us disconcertingly full circle, to a quiet and unresolved place. It’s as if all the lovely writing were the meat, with no bones beneath to gnaw on afterward. EMILY HALL

LOST AND FOUND

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
by Christopher Buckley
(HarperPerennial, 1995)
$13

After mistakenly reporting the president’s death, Nick Naylor’s career as a TV reporter is over and he is recruited by the tobacco lobby. He rises to become big tobacco’s #1 smokesman, tilting fearlessly with surgeon generals, congressmen, and outraged health-care providers alike. For fun he lunches with the Merchants of Death, comprised of himself and the heads from the alcohol and firearms lobbies, where they bounce spin control ideas off one another and generally stand up for Americans’ rights to dangerous and deadly vices in a world increasingly dominated by health Nazis and hand-wringers.

A deadly satire, Buckley’s version of corporate doublespeak is almost as guilty a pleasure as smoking itself. The outrageousness blooms when Nick launches an audacious P.R. offensive that will have him, among other things, nearly executed for crimes against humanity (attempted murder by nicotine patch), in bed with a reporter with a fetish for amorality, refusing transparent sushi with Hollywood film moguls, and investigated by the FBI.

Reading Thank You for Smoking is like appreciating a good commercial: You know you’re being sold a bill of goods, but you just can’t help admiring the slickness of the presentation and the slipperiness of the logic. With a well-paced and well-executed plot, reasonable character development, and some absolutely gorgeous laugh-out-loud irony, this is the kind of compulsively readable novel you’d want for an airplane trip somewhere far away or a rainy Sunday afternoon. DALLAS TAYLOR