Poems do not come with an accompanying interpreter all that often. Brendan Amadi’s, “Flawless Masterpiece: Poetry, Reborn Beyond Boundaries” does: each of its fifty poems is followed by a commentary from the poet that reads imagery, names devices and sets out intentions. The outcome is a volume which suggests two types of reading, one as poems, another, as a poet’s critic. The first one is not regular. The second one is revealing. From political satire to civic elegy to love poems, myth, war, pandemic and meditations on time, the collection is quite broad. That’s its greatest asset and greatest weakness. The book at its strongest is really a book of poetry. At its most atrophied level, it makes the point that everyone else had arrived at on their own before presenting it to the reader in a deceptively bland phrasing.
The Commentary: Aid or Intrusion?
The paired commentary is the structural highlight of the book. It provides perspective for readers who may not have had access to this, like the Igbo notion of wind as a transport for spirituals from ancestors, or the significance of the Sango myth in Yoruba culture. It is also a Bildungsroman about reader/poet that is composed to taste his own champagne. The analysis goes on to agree with “Beneath the Mountain’s Shadow”, which considers the king’s a characterization of “here are the qualities of the king, not the man.” Weighing in on “One Word Many Voices” itself, it says that at times, the formal structure of the poem is as a strength as it is a weakness.” But the commentaries can also, at times, do the work of the poem. The reader has less of a chance to see the meaning of a poem if the meaning is explained on the opposite page. The best poems in the book are those that don’t need any help.
Imagery and Metaphor in its Best
The best writing happens when Amadi ceases to articulate ideas and begins to put things in front of the reader. “Ikuku” is the epic journey into Aba’s compounds, in the midst of the Biafran War, with the wind. It goes by a single sandal, the other nowhere, and the open Standard 6 textbook, the pencils standing unused next to it, like the child had simply left the writing desk. The wind then comes to the broken up kitchen, and slows down as soon as it sees fermenting ogiri, warm still, and that for which no Igbo word was ever invented. Grief is not expressed in describing words, but with detail, and the lengthy, patient line-breaks lead the reader at the pace of the wind. This is its peak where it warrants association with Okigbo and Achebe as its commentary exposes.
The Boy in War” is likewise reliable. It uses a weapon that is, “does not know my name”: one that speaks “the language of us together, in the grammar of the trigger, and the punctuation of the shell. Each argument comes to a close forever with the full stop; the yam tendril that dream turns to a compound mom has is an uncannily sharp conceit and the dream of turning into “a different kind of wet” upon waking from sleep is quietly devastating. The right artistic move is to keep the pity at bay by giving the boy his voice back, and the voices of the poem do just that. Myth is also accomplished “Oba Koso” style. What happened to it was that its king claims he did not hang; that he’s the crack above the clouds that you have to venerate, even before you learn its name; that the thunder always comes after the damage. The familiar Sango story here becomes all the closer and the warning of the grandmother more than outweighed all the exposition could say.
Where the Language Falters
The poems in assonant rhyme are more willowy; the more didactic ones are less secure. Partially deceptive because of the promise in the title, “A Degree in Deceit,” indicates central conceit in its termus, listed in its stanzas, but fails to dramatise one act of deceit, opting instead for “traits,” “clever wit,” “tricks,” and “so cunning! The final picture of it is “double deception diploma will be toast, heavily gained,” a fusion of idioms that creates a hazy understanding, while the poet’s political malady remains obscure.
“Elegy of a Nation’s Vow” starts with a neat pair of rhyming couplets concerning a frayed song, and then relaxes. Rhymes are more approximate and lines like “mediocrity gleams brightly amidst lines of code” hint at the object without concretely hitting it. It’s a very angry poem, but lots of the phrases are cliché: corruption “to the brim,” dignity lost in a grave.
As for the metaphor, for the artist who works in solitude, “The Potter’s Solitude” offers hope, though there is some awkward modern to archaic phrasing in this work: “art doth not depart.” As for the closing statement, “In a word, God’s own creation. Magnificent,” it tells the reader what to feel. Because there is the moment of “a frantic flight” that starts with a sneeze in the pandemic section of “Hope in the Hollow Streets” is there, but lots of pre-made phrases like “pure ecstasy.” The refrain in “Vanity’s Clock” is a good continuation of “Here’s where it ends” and the transition from “18 to 80” and “January to December” is effective. But in that span it has a built-up of dresses, wealth and ego that is a list of vanities, not a scene lived.In-between those anchors, though, its hold on dresses has what reads like a list of vanities, a wealth and a sense of self. And the progression of register jumps the ear.
These one-time errors and omissions are occurring across the board. They tend to be abstract, to name goods and evils instead of demonstrating them, and to sometimes include inversion and filler to ensure a rhyme. A better editor would have straightened out some of the slips involved in the text and commentaries.
Rhythm and Structure
For instance, the book alternates free verse and rhyming, and clearly one is better than the other. The free-verse poems, “Ikuku,” “The Boy in War” and the two-part poem “Oba Koso” shift their pace through one-line sentences, silence, enjambment. “Oba Koso” presents the lines in these short, measured units suggesting breaks in thought, but instead permitting the space to become part of the speaking. The rhyming poems rely not always on sounds that the language provides at the end, and metre produces meandering in the middle of the poem, meaning that rhyme records, sometimes takes a ride and sometimes takes the wheel of meaning.
“A Promise in the Polar Dusk” is a compromise between the two modes. It sets the hustle and bustle of Germany’s heavily-traveled streets against the serenity of midnight sun, it’s beautifully drawn and “Even in the warmth, the land remembered” is one of the most succinctly written lines in the book. Other parts of the same poem sound simple, e.g. “howling simple.” Bisect a reader at any point down the fifty poems and he or she might find more redrafting sirens to improve the flow, the natural progression; the collection, read as a whole, is more thematic than progressive, and the best poems are broken out with a reader’s desire for another refined shaping of such extent.
Originality and Literary Significance
What is special about the collection is not a single device, but how many cultures are referred to, and how much they can deal with without ornament. Amadi appeals to Igbo cosmology and Yoruba myth, Akan concepts of personhood, the history of the Nile and the plight of Darfur. The consequence of this is an all-African lens through which the Nigerian experience is just one of many. This isn’t tourism: there is moral authority in the deities and rituals of the poems and they are never discussed in terms of local colour.
Such as collection is also a part of the known tradition of witness in Nigeria. Often, but not always, in conversation with Okigbo’s Path of Thunder and Achebe’s war poems, “Ikuku” brings something of its own: a domestic, olfactory intimacy, a movement from the battlefield to kitchen. Like Amadi’s books from Britain, the poets from the diaspora are similarly subject to nostalgia. In this case, distance yields a closer look: as in the northern scenes of “A Promise in the Polar Dusk.”
The most recurring theme in the collection is the fleeting nature of the human life, which is explored in “Instructions for Borrowed Time,” “The Hand of Time” and “Vanity’s Clock.” The repetition lends morality to the book, but also ensures that a few poems reach the same warning at the same time multiple times, and need to deliver the message three times less surprisingly.
Lastly, the use of the poem and its accompanying commentary is a very unusual form in modern African poetry, and worthy of special mention. It puts the poet on trial for what he says and makes the work accessible to students and to the general reader. It’s the most original gift in the collection, even when the poems don’t live up to the standard that the commentaries offer.
Verdict
Flawless Masterpiece is a serious and sometimes striking book. Its better poems, “Ikuku, “The Boy in War” and “Oba Koso” are poems by a poet who knows how to be concrete; they would feature in any anthology of contemporary work by Nigerian writers. It’s less solid in some of its shorter poems, where the author’s moral seriousness produces slogan poetry. It’s that imbalance that is a true reflection of the book, and it gives the best pages a sense of having to be there. The book has set such a bar, there is nothing that it can hope to do it. Its achievement is elsewhere: its range of its sources is larger, its commentary is freer and honest, its handful of poems matches grief with exactitude. It should be treated as an adventure in hope and danger, with the patience that goes hand in hand with selective reading, and as a learning opportunity for the more concentrated, and arguably image-driven, poetry for which its creator is undoubtedly adept.
