Book
review: The grandeur of bardic celebration
By HENRY AKUBUIRO (akuhen@sunnewsonline.com)
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Heinemann, Ibadan, Nigeria, pp. 128, 2007
The bard, Niyi Osundare, isn’t shagged out yet as far
as the poetic enterprise is concerned. His latest work, Days,
shows the professor of Stylistics straining at the leash to
add sublimity to his distinctive oeuvre.
Ingenuity typifies his bardic excursion, what with the erudition
of semantics, the palimpsest dimensions of subjects, melodic
compositions that sing, animated language of the cantos that
places it in a classical league, and its unique form that
is like an Arabian graphic engraving on a marble.
If you take a bite of strudel, you can hardly keep a straight
face; beams of contentment are almost inevitable on your face.
This is exactly what you get at the end of Osundare’s
rhapsodic encore, and you can even carper.
His poetry, over the years, has become a lyrical vault. This
one, with its overflow of euphonic and harmonious cadences,
from the first verse, fills you with an allurement.
We are used to the remonstrative voice of the poet on socio-political
quandaries and, just recently, Cupid meditations. Days, as
simple as the title sounds, explores the multivalent facets
of the days of the week.
This collection isn’t a singsong, like Monday we go
to school…, recited by schoolchildren before a cane-wielding
teacher. Here the poet uses an arabesque of nuances to evoke
the significance, sanctity, trials and the inevitability of
each dawn and other memorable hallmarks sanctioned by the
days.
Osundare is at liberty with the conceit mode in this poetic
assignment, and the character of each day is humanized, sometimes
with mythic and paenified overtones.
For the poet, if the verbal space must be occupied, it must
be with poetry; and his poetry serves as a tool to give vent
to his pent-up emotion, celebrate nature, and what not. Days
shows, once again, that distance isn’t a barrier to
vivid recollections. Osundare, though resident in the U.S.
for many years, is nostalgically evocative in this offering.
The expository and narrative arcs of the poems are hypnotic,
to say the least.
Days, if it must be well appreciated, must go with a dramatic
realization and appropriate musical accompaniments that characterize
performance poetry. The poet classifies the days as “the
children of the week” and he would like the poems to
be composed for full orchestration, “each day with a
rhythm of its own”.
Each day in the poems has its good and bad moments, Osundare
meditates in his poetry. The poem “Monday”, for
example, arrives “red-eyed,/ Your forehead a wrinkled
roster/ Of yester-week’s unpaid debts/ Your feet brown
with spent day”. Thus, it captures the apprehension
that Monday brings. Yet the day holds a great promise since
it is the beginning of the week. Hence, he notes: “On
your threshold, visions/ Of green dreams and virgin acres/
Time as the tree which remembers its leaves” (p. 5).
Nature referents abound in the poem. Osundare uses them to
represent the grandeur of God’s creation. For instance,
on this day, “A tender flame flickers/ In the fireplace/
Between the silver sky/ And a dew-drenched earth … the
hearth, damp all these workless hours, / Is aglow with cracking
flairs/ ashes stirring/ Heartstones laughing” (p.6).
Very particular with prosody, the poet’s lines are enriched
with alliterative sounds sometimes, like in “Monday
masters its short/ and mistresses its shuffle” (p. 7).
Note, also, the effect of anadiplosis in these lines: “…
She lives in the bossom of the bride / She lives …”
(p. 10).
Unlike Monday, the next day Tuesday, in the poem entitled
“Tuesday”, is “less predictable/ less perishable,
than its butterflies/ its pageant less extravagant”
(p. 14). Once again, Osundare deploys nature referents :“Tuesday
lulls us in the downy valley/ where time’s foliage is
truly green …/ And the sun ticks and talks/ Like the
eye of the roving owl; Its summons is simple” (p. 14).
In talking about each day, the poet uses the first alphabet
associated with the day. In the case of Tueday, words that
begin with T (The, Talkative, Through, etc.) are used respectively
on page 15 for emphasis.
When it comes to the appropriate and innovative use of words,
Osundare holds the ace in Nigerian poetry. His Linguistics
background, perhaps, gives him a leverage over other contemporary
poets. When he begins the poem “Wednesday”:
Wednesday walked into my song
Wayword like a griot
Lips laden with wit and whistle
Wizened wisecracks and bearded ballads
the poet connects disparate things with symbolic tropes that
exert a harmonious blend. The poem, like the previous ones,
is rendered in rhythmic sound. The anaphoric reverberations
in “Mind my left/ Mind my right” (p.19), the assonated
ditty in “minutes murmur into moments/ While the wink
plays record foddle” (p. 19), the repetitions in “grain
after grain after grain” (p.19) and in “grey,
loosely grey” (p.19), etc., are cantata-like.
Thursday is the fourth stanza of the week, and it begets melody
so serious, so momentous and tremulous on the long strings.
Osundare’s onomatopoeic declarations are evident in
the poem, as he portrays the day’s coming with a tall
span between tender dawn and mellow dusk (p. 26).
The last day of the week, Friday, grabs the week by its tail,
and it is a diary of wild finality and winful startings. Enjambments
and rhetorical questions are some of the nuggets the poet
utilizes in this poem, and they flow as a river does to its
bank:
Fryday fry-day, how many headless fishes dance in the dread
ful oil of your evening, the
firewood of hours glowing red and rude beneath your pot? How
many bended backs sizzle black
and blighted in the vineyard of your vice? How many…
(p. 34).
While Saturday is a “bound day/free day” (p. 38),
Sunday “sits supreme/At the bottom of the diurnal ladder/Young
from its midnight coming”. In other poems, “Days
Never”, “Some Days”, “Thief of Time”,
“Day-do”, “Food Day”, “Between
Night and Day”, “Day of Zebra”, “Ododere
Day”, “Millipede”, “Earthworm”,
“Day of the Pigeon”, “Day of the Cat”,
“Day of the Baobad”, “Day of the Crossroads”,
“Birth Day”, “January 10”, April 22”,
“April 23, 1564”, “Empire Days”, “Independence
Day”, “First Day of Spring”, “Jump
Day”, “Day of Lilly”, “Questions”,
“Sun or Roof”, “The Dial”, “Love
Day”, and “I Envy the Day”, the poet prosecutes
his poetic mission with a plenitude of symbols and semantics
that elevate bardic celebration.
With Osundare, poetry makes a compelling read anyday. |
