SOURCE: "Depending on the Light: Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau," in America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War, edited by Owen W. Gilman, Jr., and Lorrie Smith, Garland Publishing, 1990, pp. 282-300.

In the following excerpt from a comparative study of Vietnam War poets, Gotera discusses Komunyakaa's use of surrealism, language, and imagery in Dien cai dau.

Dien Cai Dau is Komunyakaa's fourth book of poems. In his earlier three books, he has not included a single poem on Vietnam, because he has been waiting for emotional distance—objective and journalistic—from his 1969–70 Army tour there. George Garrett, in his introduction to [D. C.] Berry's saigon cemetery, proposes that "ordinary judgment [of Berry's poems] must be suspended. We are too close, and the wounds and scars, literal and metaphorical, are too fresh." It is just such a suspension of judgment that Komunyakaa does not...