Analysis Of Magic City By Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry is often called literature that provides windows to the soul. This is because many poets instill their own experiences into their works. Yusef Komunyakaa is one of those poets. Through his poems, he reveals the darkness, pain, and atrocities of war he experienced when he served in Vietnam, as well as his experiences growing up in the deep south when the KKK was in power and through the start of the Civil Rights Movement. Growing up in a time of turmoil, and as a African American man in a principally racist America, Komunyakaa 's works shed light on conflict as well as it’s resolution. In his collection of poems, Magic City, Komunyakaa explores hidden stories and masked brutality not only in his racially violent hometown, Bogalusa, …show more content…
Just like the father tries to redeem himself in the poem, Komunyakaa has stubborn hope for America as he tries to redeem it from the violence of the country 's history. The title of the poem immediately lends itself to the ambiguous, and contrasting style between tenderness and brutality. The term “love letters” has connotations of tenderness, adoration, loyalty, deep, soft feelings of warmth and goodness of human nature. But as seen throughout the poem, the father is a desperate, depressed man who is more accurately described as pleading for his wife’s return. In the letters, the father would “beg, / Promising to never beat her / Again.” (lines 7-9). Komunyakaa uses the term “love letter” as a foil to enhance the contrasting emotions that come out in the poem. The technique of putting contrasting objects side by side vividly brings out differences, and the specific title Komunyakaa chose enhances the anguish of the father. This particular style also carries into the poem when Komunyakaa describes to father. He doesn’t use a laundry list of adjectives to characterize the man. Instead, he paints of picture of him through vivid, opposing, and incongruous imagery. The father’s carpenter