Yusef Komunyakaa's foreword to The Silence Of Men

To read some sample poems from this book, click here.

If beauty resides in truth, then there are moments of severe beauty and tantalizing energy in Richard Newman’s The Silence Of Men. Beginning with the collection’s title, one is keenly aware of a provocative tension, and the mind makes a few questions stand up in the heart. The poet has our attention. Why a silence of men? Does this silence exist between fathers and sons, brothers, or between most men and women? Is it natural or unnatural? In this sense, the title works as an axiom that creates a motion.

The reader’s inquisitive journey begins with the first seventeen lines of “What I Carry With Me”:

I came home that night,
  my shirt thick with the
      smell of your cigarettes,

to a sleeping wife and child,
   and I sat in the large green chair
      at the other end of the house,

and I stared in disbelief and sorrow:
   I no longer loved you.
      The living room walls,

lit up briefly by the headlights
   of a passing car, recalled to me
      the first bedroom where I woke

crying from nightmares
   you saved me from, your palm
      against my cheek, your lips

pressed to my forehead, amulets
   I took back with me to sleep....”

Here, truth is discovered in the poem’s straightforward tone, in its coloration, without facade or extreme embellishment. No, this isn’t a confession exacted by a grand inquisitor, but it is a voice we can trust, and even believe in. And, yes, this is the primary triumph of The Silence of Men. We have been taught to equate silence with strength—the strong, silent type.

Oftentimes, we are silent about what we witness. But Richard Newman’s narrator suggests that there’s inherent strength in the telling and sharing, in a dialogue. His poetry dares us, as men, as human beings, to share what we have experienced and imagined—the good and the bad. He seems to be saying that dialogue is what makes each of us whole. Not in a gush, but through a measured language that embraces art. Also, the speaker in this collection suggests that we are responsible for what we know, for what we’ve witnessed and dreamt, and for what we don’t say to ourselves and each other.

The speaker in The Silence of Men is determined to gain a sense of Self. And, at times, as the reader journeys through this collection, he or she may feel that the narrator is speaking to himself or having a dialogue with some phantom other, but what always comes through is a reflection that almost approaches a moment of redemption. Though there are numerous stories here that reflect the past, we remain in the urgency of the present, fully engaged and compassionate.

In this chronicle of confrontations, this journey, everything culminate in a five-line poem entitled “Catching My Breath”:

My body has learned many lies,
but here, in this bed we share,
they fall from me till I am clean,
a tree in winter,
awaiting the new season.

Of course, this “new season” can only happen through an act of self-forgiveness, after silence has been bridged and a dialogue has been created. The Silence of Men is daring: there’s a moral gesture at the heart this collection, but the poetry isn’t moralistic or didactic. In fact, when the narrator says, “I’m not being hard on myself,” we know that the whole journey has been about freedom, renewal, and release.

–Yusef Komunyakaa

Sample poems from The Silence Of Men

The Silence Of Men

A man I’ve never dreamed before walks
into my apartment and sits in the green
chair where I do my writing. He carries
in his left hand a large erect penis
which he places silently on the floor.
The phallus begins to waltz to music
I cannot hear, its scrotum a skirt;
its testicles, legs cut off at the knees.

I want to know why this disfigured
manhood has been brought to me. I look up,
but my guest is gone. His organ, deflating
in short spasms like an old man coughing,
spreads itself in a pool of shallow blood.
The silence between us is the silence of men.

Light

In the dream, my life was smoke: I couldn’t breathe.
So I ran, unwrapping myself down the beach
till your skin, the ocean, lapped at my knees.
I dove in. Your voice was a current,
a melody gathering words to itself
for us to sing, and we sang them,
and they swirled around us, iridescent fish
bringing light to the world you were for me;

and then I was water, a river
washing the night from your flesh,
and I cradled your body rising in me
till you were clean, glowing,
and when you surfaced, glistening,
there was not an inch of you I didn’t cling to.

Dear Yoon

When you went home that night to tell your husband
and he took the swing that missed your jaw
and bruised your arm, I wanted you enough
to see that blue-black Rorschach on your flesh
as a gift. Now, behind me on this train,
a mother worries in your language
that her daughter is too old to find a man.
Ji-in must be sixteen by now, too young
for you to worry yet, and yet the voice
your sister screamed in when she saw my face—
Go! Be a round-eyed’s whore! May your daughter
do the same!—will not have been forgotten.
Even all these years later your neighbors
will wonder which of them would dare
give their son to such a woman’s offspring.

Last night, the small commotion of my spilled drink
turned a woman’s face I thought was yours
to where I was sitting. If it had been you,
what would I have said?
                                           Remember the beach in Pusan?
We laughed like newlyweds, took these pictures
I joked our children would someday call treasures.
I’m looking at the one of you on the rock we climbed
to escape the stares that brought back
your talk of suicide. You grabbed my hand,
led me to the edge and we stood gazing out
over the water, a future
waiting for us to cross it.
                                            Yoon,
you’ll read this only if you read my book.
These lines must end. I have to let you go.

Isaac's Story

The woman’s swelling body looked misplaced
in the midst of all they did to murder us.
This embryo must perish, der Hauptmann’s voice
prescribed the quick removal of a cyst.
If not, we’ll take it at birth. He smiled the rest,
flicked his wrist to let the woman pass.
Two months later, the boy was born. The bris—
with our mohel dead, the doctor did his best
to learn the prayers—took place the night
they hanged a man for smuggling and shot
his wife and kids for being who they were.
I held the baby in my lap, but before
the child lost his flesh as we’d been taught,
we whispered kaddish: the dead were there.

To The Woman At The Bar

Brown hair, leather jacket, torn jeans,
suppose I walk across this room right now
and offer you a drink. Would you tell me

you’re a painter, a middle sister with four brothers,
whose mother’s work of art is the life
she tries daily to seduce you into? Would you

finger-stir your scotch, eyes averted, waiting
for words you’ll know when you hear them
were those you wanted your blond, hovering boyfriend

to say, or leave, or you knew you’d walk out?
And his silence left you no choice?
Would you dance with me, end the evening

on the couch your mother bought wholesale,
pushed against the balcony’s grate
so we can fuck overlooking the river?

Instead, will we talk about your work?
Will I leave with your number scribbled
just below my chin in the caricature

you sketch of me as the drummer
I never had the courage to become?
A week from now, will we meet for sushi?

Two nights later, the European art film
with real sex in it? You tell me your name
means pearl in the language your father spoke,

that your mother gave it to you when he left.
You ask me up to see your paintings.
I want to say I see in them

a foreshadowing of what comes next,
but what comes next poses formal problems
I would have to know you to solve.