Thieves of Paradise, the collection in which "Ode to a Drum" is included, was Komunyakaa's tenth book and the first since his Pulitzer Prize—winning Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. As a highly anticipated volume, the book was widely reviewed in mainstream and poetry publications, though very few reviewers made direct mention of "Ode to a Drum."

Writing in Poetry, John Taylor describes Komunyakaa's poetry as bristling with "vitality, vibrancy, and an admirable concern for human suffering." The poems in Thieves of Paradise, Taylor writes, are at times "[s]o compelling . . . that only second readings reveal his tours de force."

In a brief New Yorker review, the anonymous reviewer writes of the book's "surrealist riffs, with their almost hallucinatory lushness [and] their power to convince us that the individual imagination is more than equal to the most excruciating historical burden." Similarly, Publishers Weekly describes...