SOURCE: A review of Dien Cai Dau, in Poetry, Vol. CLVI, No. 2, May, 1990, pp. 102-05.

In the following positive review, Cramer examines Komunyakaa's depiction of the Vietnam War in Dien cai dau.

Dien Cai Dau (the title, meaning "crazy," is Vietnamese slang for "American soldier") strives for total immersion in the visceral horrors of America's most unpopular war, the book's forty-four poems assembled without the intervention of section dividers or the mediation of an epigraph. It's as if Komunyakaa wanted nothing to palliate the blinding immediacy of combat.

Komunyakaa served in Vietnam as a correspondent, and as a number of his titles signal—"Camouflaging the Chimera," "Somewhere Near Phu Bai," "Starlight Scope Myopia," "We Never Know"—he seeks to depict the sheer confusion of war, the infantryman's chronic sense of dislocation. Sometimes the soldier's survival depends upon this absence of distinct outlines: "when will we learn / to move...