A Brief Book Review of The Emperor of Water Clocks by Yusef Komunyakaa
When I was young, a popular rap song came out called “Mad Flava in Your Ear” by the artist Craig Mack. Mack was an artist on the Bad Boy label founded by the hip-hop impresario Sean Puffy Combs, which most famously featured that late titan of rap Biggie Smalls. Over a slow, tugboat-like, see-saw beat, Craig Mack, as rap artists do, boasted about how much better he was at rapping than the competition by saying, “Your album couldn’t fuck with one line.” I remember hearing that and having to step back and unpack it, thinking it one of the greatest boasts of self-confidence I’d ever heard. Here was Craig Mack saying one line of my lyrics is better than your whole album. He didn’t have many other (if any) hits after that, but the boast remained pinned to the walls of my memory. I have happily in a life of literary and artistic consumption encountered artists who could truly make that boast. I had that feeling finishing one of Yusef Komunyakaa’s collection of poems, “The Emperor of Water Clocks”. Toward the end of the collection is a poem titled “Monolith” where Komunyakaa writes “tomorrow hides inside of yesterday.” I dropped the book I was so impressed. The sentiment was not new but the phrasing and the simple beauty of it floored me. That’s the sort of feeling you come across reading Komunyakaa’s poems, which mix past, present, and future mythologies to create images as varied as lion’s on a savannah, New York cafes, and imperial drawing rooms.