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    A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera"
    A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera"
    A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera"
    Ebook34 pages28 minutes

    A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535820394
    A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Yusef Komunyakaa's "Camouflaging the Chimera" - Gale

      11

      Camouflaging the Chimera

      Yusef Komunyakaa

      1988

      Introduction

      Some fourteen years after serving as an information specialist—that is, a military journalist—for the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War, Yusef Komunyakaa found himself inspired to write poems based on his wartime experiences. Circumstances seemed to conspire to first bring this verse to the poet's mind: he was renovating a house in New Orleans in the summer of 1984, climbing up and down a ladder while working on the twelve-foothigh ceilings, when he found himself recording in his notebook images from the war. As he would later note in an interview with William Baer for the Kenyon Review, there was a kind of familiar tropic heat that day. So it was the heat, and the dust, and the dismantling of things—and that's how it happened.

      Dien Cai Dau (1988), Komunyakaa's second and more significant volume of poetry about the Vietnam War, takes its title from a Vietnamese expression meaning crazy in the head that was used to refer to the American soldiers who fought there. In contrast to much of the Vietnam War verse penned during or soon after the war, Dien Cai Dau is notable for largely foregoing the raw power of graphic shock in favor of the more enduring virtues of illuminative reflection. The volume opens fittingly with Camouflaging the Chimera, a poem that delves into the mortal tension of soldiers engulfed in nature while poised to spring an ambush. The ambush has not yet been sprung by the poem's end, such that the life-or-death tension stays with the reader long after the last line has been read. This poem can also be found in the author's Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001).

      Author Biography

      Komunyakaa was born as James Willie Brown, Jr., in Bogalusa, Louisiana, on April 29, 1947, the first of six children to his working-class parents. Later in life, he would change his name to adopt

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