EVER since I got a signed copy of James Eze’s debut
collection of poetry, dispossessed, I’ve been possessed! Poetry can be
overwhelming at the best of times such that it becomes a benumbing challenge
getting the aesthetic distance to engage in a proper intercourse with the text,
as per a review.
Among the cognoscenti, James Eze had already won pips of
high recognition within the comity of poets even without having a title in
bound covers to his name. Eze is cast in the mode of the deposition of W. B.
Yeats that the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate
intensity.
In appreciating Eze’s poetry, I will hold to Yeats’
depiction of the Irish revolutionaries of Easter 1916: “A terrible beauty is
born.”
Eze’s dispossessed bears the subtitle “poetry of innocence,
transgression and atonement”, and incidentally, the entire collection is
divided into three parts, namely, “innocence” (21 poems), “transgression” (31
poems) and “atonement” (24 poems). The poet’s delineation of the three stages,
not unlike Sigmund Freud’s Id, Ego and Super-Ego, runs thus: “In innocence, we encounter
the poet in the early stages of his artistic development… transgression
presents the poet at a very delicate stage in his emotional and creative
development… In atonement, we meet the poet at the end of his journey … a
frantic attempt to engage the world, not on anyone’s terms but his own.”
Eze sums up his odyssey this way: “dispossessed is therefore
a journey that begins with laughter and blissful innocence but ends with
heartache and a blinking back of tears.”
For me, there is a seamless blend of the three sections
because the poet at no time encounters the atrophy of vision that undermines
the work of stereotypical poets. The passionate flow of Eze’s métier seeps into
the pores ceaselessly without any breaks whatsoever.
Like the great American avant-garde poet ee cummings, James
Eze renders his poetry in lower case. The only other Nigerian poet of my
knowledge who has this style is amu nnadi.
It’s remarkable that on the cover of dispossessed the
author’s name is given just as James Eze while inside the book we are given the
larger bona-fide of James Ngwu Eze. The poet does the formal introduction of
himself in the second poem in the collection “i am”:
I am ngwu
nwa nkpozi eze
striving for self-definition
The poet’s forte in defining himself actually manifested
earlier in the very first poem of the collection “petals & buds”:
for I am the missing lobe of poetry’s kolanut
the fearless chest that absorbs the anger of razor blades
I surrender my anvil at the crossroads
and unscrew the cork of my silence
Eze then situates himself as somewhat appearing late within
the ambit of world poetry, but the company he keeps is quite intimidating as
can be seen from the poem “here i come”:
here I come
to the great feast of words
the late bloomer;
i come when the table is set
dinner is redolent with
the fragrance of great chefs:
okigbo, neruda, eliot, pound, yeats…
A poet bearing the bounties of Christopher Okigbo, Pablo
Neruda, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats perforce demands uncommon attention
from the very beginning. Eze is in no doubts whatsoever as per the demands of
his poetic calling espoused in “here i am”:
here I am
prophet, priest and pilgrim
Amid his plough of the dead poets’ society, Eze is very
unafraid to challenge the masters, for instance, frontally disagreeing in his
poem “april” with Eliot:
april is not ‘the cruelest month’
I beg to differ, sir
Eliot had depicted April as “the cruelest month” in his
masterpiece The Waste Land. April ought to stand out as the beginning of summer
and therefore a month of joy but for the “wastelanders” of Eliot’s iconic poem
that eternally wallow in torpor the appearance of light only means the cruelty
of work.
Eze is different, stressing that “i bless God that I am a
child of april”, and concludes floridly thus:
i came, swaddled in april haze
i’m the reason why the sun kissed the rain under the
mistletoe
the silent flame under the bushel
waiting for a gust of wind to blaze
A major influence that Eze is beholden to is of course
Okigbo, like many other modern day Nigerian poets. Little wonder there is the
poem entitled “idoto” in the collection while poems such as “a fistful of
kolanuts” and “elegy of the weaverbird” are dedicated to the Ojoto-born poet
killed in the Biafra war.
In the same manner that I see Bob Marley at equal range as a
political singer and a belter of soulful love songs, I cannot see any
separation whatsoever from Eze the love poet and Eze the poet of politics.
Eze is proud of his Igbo heritage, and the Biafra war is a
subject very dear to his heart. He would not bend the knee to the modern scheme
of, for instance, seeing the late Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa as a saint, for
he writes in “re: epitaph for Biafra”:
you let the plume of smoke dull your sense of justice
you shut the door on right and chose wrong
and that is why you are not my hero
True heroism for Eze can be found in the courageous 1803 revolt
by 75 Igbo slaves in Dunbar Creek, Georgia which he celebrates in “the igbo
landing”:
In what moulds were you forged, brave ancestors
You who threw a finger in the eye of cruelty
And spat in the face of slavery?
The title poem “dispossessed” is crucially the longest in
the collection and somehow encapsulates the poet’s love-hate relationship with
the existing order:
when injustice is buried in a shallow grave
we await the resurrection of dry bones
The headstrong critic in me, however, queries why in his
“introduction” to dispossessed the poet writes that the third section,
“atonement”, has as its “opening poem, ‘the poets’ republic’” only for the poem
to somehow appear as the second poem in the section, after “a fistful of
kolanuts” dedicated to Christopher Okigbo! And why does one poem in the
collection, “i ask of You” (pg52), have a capital “Y”?
Well, as I wrote from the very beginning, James Eze’s
dispossessed left me possessed, that is, it dispossessed of my faculties. Eze’s
collection had an unhinging effect on me in very profound ways, thus rendering
me quite possessed by a benevolent spirit that I initially thought was an evil
one! I was mad with poetical-mental beneficence forged on the anvil of Eze’s
word-smithy.
In my book, dispossessed by James Eze ranks amongst the best
collections of poetry anywhere across the globe.”