The advent of social media has a positive influence on the development of literature and cultural activities generally. Others would argue in the same vein that social media has also watered down the quality of the literary outputs it has helped to produce, just as it propelled mediocre writers into the peak of popularity (for example, Rapi Kaur). As part of the opportunities and the democratisation of the arts which the internet has fostered, there is also the development of writers’ collectives and networks which leverage the ubiquity and availability of social networks to bring together disparate writers, creatives and readers for the love of the arts. The absence of publishing outlets and the general lack of creative opportunity and infrastructure, as well as the cultural miasma in northern Nigeria has benefited greatly from the internet with the founding of the #PoeticWednesday initiative by Salim Yunusa. The Collective curates poetry every Wednesday on its Facebook page and later on ventured into other social media outlets with a number of literary events such as readings, book chats and author meet-and-greet sessions. Also, the collective mentors writers by linking up-and-coming writers with more established ones as their mentors to develop their craft and hone their writing skills.
One of the products of such a mentorship initiative is Ahmed Isa Sabo (stylised as A.I. Sabo), a poet, entrepreneur and student unionist. Having served his apprenticeship diligently, and publishing many poems collected in the book under review in many journals and anthologies. Sabo has now published his debut collection, The Songs of a Bard. The book contains 38 poems of varying lengths and styles, divided into 3 unequal sections. The first untitled section contains three poems, the magnum opus of the collection, “The Songs of Birds” and two short poems. The longer “Songs of Birds” running into 5 and a half pages is the centre of the book and arguably the most accomplished of all the poems in the collection. The poem starts as an elegy with the poet inquiring from his grandma about the whereabouts of his father:
When I learned the language of cobwebs,
Crevices homing lizards on muddy walls,
A flame imprisoned in the glass-ring of lamp
And a thatched mattress in grandpa’s room;
Then I inquired of her a thousand times
“Lala, where is my father?”
To the heavens she said he has gone (p.1).
Then the poet moves poignantly to two of his lost friends: Ahmad and Mukhtar, who as the poet’s soulmates were “nothing but ambassadors of love”. As time moves on, so is the elegiac progression, “like fleeting clouds so were our vanishing days/ As spider spins fibers, fate spun her shroud/To sow our eldest soul mate, Auwal”.
From here, the poem takes on a different tone different from the earlier established elegiac mood to one reminiscing about love and favours from the poet’s friends who also departed this world:
Through a territory of hate and love I roamed
My angel, Sani inebriated me with the wine of love
Later I was drunk and he departed in a box of sand.
My skull squeaked with fierce desperation
And deafened by the squawk of sparrows.
My angel, Babayo nourished me like a soft flower;
This was deflowered by a spear of fate
For Lala vanished with particle of dust,
My tongue enjoyed the sweetness of life’s mahogany;
I wandered like a forlorn lamb in the gloomy ring of life (p.2).
In haunting, melancholic lyricism, the poem moves on, lamenting the passing of the poet’s kith and kin such as Khadija (the “infant angel of beauty”) and narrates the life struggle of the poet amidst difficulty and how he eventually overcame the vicissitudes of life and its challenges and later on graduating from the English Department of Yobe State University. The section concludes with 2 short, epigraphic poems on time and hope.
The next section titled “Dust”, the shortest of the three sections contains 12 poems mostly Haikus and epigraphic beauties. One notable feature of the poems collected here is the domination of despondent tone and tenor: the poems are about grief and despair (both personal and communal), but they are not (like most recent poetry books in Nigeria) inundated by the thematic mode they are written in. In addition, the poems are more overtly “political”, and topical and are the sort one could call the “state of the nation” poems. The following poems stand out from the section: “A Sphere of Despair”, “That Time Shall Come” with its memorable refrain and its evocation of hope and the longer “Reflection”.
The longer poems not just in the second section but in the rest of the book are more accomplished and successful than the shorter, braver ones. “Reflection” proves that. It is for one, a meditation on history and the effect of time on historical personalities and empires as well as the belief of the poet in the oneness of God in the face of current irreligious fervour all around him. The other notable poems are “The Tears of a Broken Land” and “The Night of Doom” each of which laments the state of the Nigerian state and the efficacious condition it presently finds itself in.
The concluding, metapoetic and aptly titled section, “Words-Worth” mostly contains a sequence of love poems and metapoems, again of varying length and styles. Like the previous sections, the longer more tend to be the most technical and successful. The stand-out poem here is: “Unsaid Poetry” which reminds me of Richard Ali’s “The Anguish and Vigilance of Things” (2019), as well as John Keats’s famous line: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”. The poem unfolds like a photo negative being developed into a poetic vignette, freezing some fleeting moments, concretizing them not just as mental pictures but as verbal icons. There are also two further elegies here in the section: “Tears for Mukhtar” and “Adieu”. The first is for the eponymous Mukhtar, a childhood friend of the poet. The poem reminisces about their time together, recalling their childhood adventures and ending with a note of sadness:
I mingle with your dreams
Recollecting your ambitions as spoken
Fond memories all left for me to hold
You left me lone and desolate, Mukhtar (p30).
The second elegy, “Adieu” is also about a coursemate of the poet, Muhammad. Together with the poet, they envisioned a future: “We‘d talk of building dreams, tall dreams” (p.31). But he left too soon before the realisation of those beautiful dreams they had:
You have set with the sun,
So soon and left us
With uncompleted buildings of dreams
Like a project in the hands of a bad contractor
But unlike smokes, memories of you never will fade
And so shall you live in my poems (p.31).
The poem ends with a promise of immortality conferred on the subject in a poetic move similar to that of the famous Shakespearian sonnet (Sonnet 18) where the beloved whose beauty would eventually fade has immortality thrust upon her because the poet has written about her, for which she will forever be remembered.
“To My Beloved” is an epistolary love poem which ends with the bon mot:
If my medals and combat attires
Come to you as this letter—my last words,
Tell my unborn baby to forgive me
For I sacrificed her welfare for the green-white veil (p.29).
Other love poems in the section are 6 poems in the series called “Beloved” with “Beloved VI” the most moving blazon, reeling out the features of the unnamed beloved, emphasizing her beauty, charms and values. Further love poems are those in the mini cycle, “Fulani Girl I, II and III”.
A hallmark of a “successful” love poem is for the poet to conceive and write each love poem as a meditation on its romantic/erotic/sensuous theme and mood. In this sense, the love poems are at once more successful because though they may have been written to or for a specific person (though unnamed) they are also universal in their conception and depiction of love. It is in this regard that other love poems in the section should be highlighted, for example, “Forgive Me”, which unravels the anxiety of the persona in the presence of the beloved and “Goddess of Purity”, which likens the beloved’s waist beads to counting the rosary, lost in the spiritual aura her presence is akin to a prayer:
In a stupor of lust, I lose myself to euphoria each time
you dance a step to uproar the flame of thirst
in me—tinges me to pray more and more
until my prayer leads me to forbidden hell—
a fitting reward for the lunatic lovers
[…]
What more should I worship but you—goddess of purity?
if I die in my euphoria, bury me in your purity
let my soul soar with your steps across the seven skies
and tonight, tell the stars of how our love dazzles
brighter than they ever could (p.48).
The last of the love poems in the section is the erotic “A Fire-Smoke of Burning Desire” in which the persona cocooned in the embrace of the beloved “inhale the perfume of desire in your soft breath/ as my tongue examine the taste of your lipstick” (P. 49). The poem describes further the lust-erotic encounter with the beloved with uncharacteristic sensuousness at the end of which both the beloved and the persona fade into ecstasy as the persona “submerge pieces of bliss/Into the dark cave down your groin—where my pen explores/The hidden treasures of mystery” (P.49). The poem ends with revelation that not even poetry is enough to capture the essence of the lust-erotic encounter with the beloved even when such is ironically said in poetry:
Poetry cannot find words sensuous enough for this
Yet this euphoric cave bears my mysticism
If this dream is of hereafter, please God kill me now! (p. 49).The Songs of a Bard opens in an elegiac poise with death but ends with sexual ecstasy and romantic exuberance we associate with young poets coming into their own poetic adventure. Though the three sections of the book may not have necessarily been written with any circle or sequence in mind, the poems in each of the sections “cohere” and “conspire” to tell a composite poetic story, one in which the disparate personas, themes and subjects serve as both culture-bound, geographically identifiable agents, and more significantly as universal trope which any reader anywhere could relate with. This in itself is quite a feat for a young poet to achieve. Unlike many recent Nigerian poetry collections where certain words and turn of phrases (such as the body, grief, for example) saturate the poetry and render whatever excellence such books may have had hollow, the present collection with its modest offering and heightened ambition has indeed surpassed expectation for its deft handling of the subject of death, grief and love, but also for its technical accomplishment largely unexpected of a debutant poet. The language is even in its complexity and simplicity, the images are clear, and the tropological resources deployed are in tandem with the poetic ambitions of the poet. I look forward to the next collection of the poet, knowing fully the promise such a book holds.
Ismail Bala writes in English and Hausa. His poetry and translations have appeared in the UK, the USA, Canada, India and South Africa, in journals such as Poetry Review, Ambit, New Coin, Ake Review, Lunaris, A Review of International English Literature and Aura Literary Arts Review, among many others. Born and educated to university level in Kano, he did his post-graduate studies at Oxford. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Belarusian, Nepalese, Slovenian and Polish. He is a Fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa. He is the author of Line of Sight (Praxis, 2020), A Span of Something (INKspired, 2024) and Ivory Night (KSR, 2024).