Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Saturday, October 7, 2006
Imitations of Gold – Poems
Reginald Chiedu Ofodile
(ISBN: 987-070-711-5;
Printhall Ltd., Lagos Nigeria; 2006, pp. 52; Price, NA)
Available at:
tigerprinthall@yahoo.com
Intimations of Gold by Reginald Chiedu Ofodile is a slim, spartan, and splendid collection of two dozen intimate poems written largely from the heart. They are personal, revealing, yet diverse. In their various focus and facets, these poems reaffirm one irrefutable truism of poetry; they are in essence “emotions of recollected tranquility”.
Also as the great sages and thinkers of the literary world have variously averred, poetry has several imports in that they “bring souls to activity,” “force of language into meaning”, and “gives life to fiction”. All these and then some, are replete in this slender reminiscences that form Ofodile’s collection.
Ofodile in youthful exuberance or maybe in a flash of prodigy, has ventured into a realm where angels fear to tread. It is said, “a great poet writes of his times”. So too does Ofodile, even if in a constricted sense and timeframe. But to stake claim to being a poet is to enter into an arena suffused already with immortalized legends, great minds, and people of skill from various civilizations. One thinks in this sense, of icons like Kwesi Brew, Gabriel Okara, Chris Okigbo, George Awoornor-Williams, Lord Byron, William Butler Yeats, and Sir Walter Scott.
As I perused this anthology over and over again, re-reading with keen attention some poems of which subject matter I was privy to, it struck me that Ofodile writes with candor, insight, gift of gab, and most of all, with love. In this context, he responds fully to Thomas Carlyle's assertion that “a poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility” .
Aside from love, Ofodile’s debut is essentially, as the forward to the collection attests, the incisive parsing of the idiosyncrasies of two cultures, one into which he was born and the other, in which he has by choice elected to reside. But in both cultures he has found his niche, subjects, facts and the ennui on which to predicate his observations and assessments, presenting them as it were, with a show of “disgust, appreciation, humor, wit, restiveness and yielding” but above all, with love and compassion. His observational power is ever present and his affinity to the persona subjects or conversance with certain issues brings clarity and added value to the end product.
Though Ofodile, in the main, resorts to Western imageries and metaphors, the baseline of the thinking is largely instructed by his Igbo antecedence and culture and even if craftily veiled, his legalistic mind and training.
One poem after another, Ofodile is not bashful about heaping praise to loved ones. He fondly enounced his father as a “knight in glinting plate, a brave or classic, swanking swain …unswerving, spruce urbane”. His grandma, he dotingly noted that she was “a woman of dignity, style, grace, elegantly gowned, bejeweled an and high-heeled, lauded and placed at the high table by society”
Each poem in this miscellany stands out on its own merit and intent. However, I found three poems especially enticing, “Comment on Decorum”, A Magnificent Intervention” and “A Cold Creed”. In each of these, Ofodile is intriguingly discerning in offering his candid perspective. In his hand, language and time commingle and congeal, yet offering a mosaic of events and places to the reader that are far from static or dull. Imagine his take in “A Cold Creed”:
In the West, taut grimaces pass for smile
the giver nervous lest their effervescence
exceeds the other’s by touch, nod or glance
stints handshakes, chuckles and invitations.
The stranger learns that to ignore friends
or bestow at most a stiff, aloof nod
accords with general mores, and seals up
his gaiety like cocoa beans in the pod.
The slant and intrinsic value of the foregoing stanza, would be perhaps, best appreciated by only those accustomed to such mock civility, and cultivated impudence sheeted in unspoken assumptions. How true, how revealing and how apropos to the timid or unschooled stranger making an initial acquaintance with western civilities, culture and modus oparandi. Such reticence born of xenophobia and at times, of solipsism, is often a mask or mark of a road, which is by choice not taken.
Overall, Ofodile is alive to the tenets of classical poetry. His poems are mostly set in short quatrains and roundels that strive to offer rhyme and rhythm. In “Two Faces” he postulates a persona as “subdued by grief”; “shipwrecked by on a reef ” and for whom “there’ll be no relief”. The following stanza couple “by spears” with “my tears” and “past years”.
Intimations of Gold offer a brief but comforting escape to the readers. You are called upon to wallow blissfully in circumstances that are benign and philosophical. Yes, as has been noted, the “author rejects airy or sloppy modernity”. He invites his present interlocutor and indeed posterity, to become not just spectators, but his conscientious allies in his iterative attempts to grasp, parse and invigilate the fixations, foibles of our contrasting cultural worlds. This terse but not necessarily sketchy collection of poems, is a worthy and ennobling effort, even though its editing and formatting would have benefited to no end from an eagle–eyed professional.
------------