Oil Lamp: Poems

Oil is my curse, oil is our doom.Where are my children? Where is my husband?Ashes and bones, ashes and bones. So sings a 90-year-old widow whose husband fell off an oilrig and drowned. The unending carnage in the poet's native Niger Delta provides a frame with which Ogaga Ifowodo seeks to mine meaning out of the patently absurd. The poems here are fragments out of the deluge. Born of complex and diverse registers, they speak with a voice that is robustly universal yet rooted in local lore. The public idiom of Udje performance poetry sits comfortably with a private and intimate rhetoric to generate a tension that is resolved in a muscular, fighting poetry that startles with lyric tenderness.