Book Review: In Garko’s When Day Breaks, the elegant poems leave the reader begging for more.
Review by Eugene Yakubu
Behind this unpromising title
are promising verses that will hold a reader spellbound with the wittiness,
precision of imagination and prominent conceits. Garko’s poetry invites the
reader to go beyond his imagination and expand his worldview with carefully
molded verses and turgid images.
What makes his poetry amusing is
that it possesses a fair amount of literary and linguistic acuity that exudes
enormous meaning in little lines— a feature of some of the most sophisticated
poets only.
It leaves the reader begging for
more, cut too quick from this imaginative ecstasy that delivers in its first
and short verses then allows the deafening sound of the mental images created
to echo in the reader’s head.
This is a collection to be read
even though the themes end at surreal surfaces, only striking at the emotions,
it offers a lot about love and nature, nostalgia and identity, virtues and
vices and the illusory feeling of connection with the world and the floating
time.
In The
Breath of Time, the precision of description is laudable. One
can’t help but applaud when reading lines like “In the first breath of time/
Then hours snored/ … buried in us is fire that will grow water/ In the palm of
tomorrow”.
The poet always gets across to
readers in graphic images and symbols, and tattoos his ideas in the readers’
mind in the subtlest of ways.
This collection befits its
praise as “amazing” by Daily Trust Newspaper and even will demand more if the
reader is fortunate enough to experience it.
The poet always seems disconnected
with the world. The backdrop of his poems can barely be said to be reconciled
to this tangible world. There is a special relationship with a higher realm in
his poems.
He gives the reader a sensual
aliveness and leaves the meaning like mist in the air for the reader to arrange
and tie together like a puzzle— by so doing, the reader is allowed to transpose
himself fully into the poem and to exercise his imagination too.
In the poem Departure, the poet captures the anxiety that leaving loved ones causes.
The somber atmosphere created by departing lovers, the dull tone, the feeling
of nostalgia are all created with words beautiful enough to make the reader
freeze and then purge his pent-up emotions by exhaling. The words are simply
beautiful and enchanting too. It goes: “That sunny day you doffed/ your eyes
off me/ The gloom disgorged/ And spread upon me its coverlet” (30). Each word
speaks for itself and gives a totally different image and feeling to the
reader.
One notable feat in most of the
poems here is the poet’s ability to create empathy in the readers. You can
almost feel what the poet felt when scribbling and you can just imagine the
emotions looming behind in his head when he was struggling to pour them in the
paper.
The poem Refugee is effective and gives the reader just the right amount of
emotions to empathize with the emptiness these displaced people feel.
The poems nevertheless have
issues in maintaining a cohesive theme and rhythm. Had the poet sustained his
verses a little bit more, it would have hit clearly at features of grand
artistry. It might not actually finish at the same pace it started and with the
same ideas it holds but it brings out enough questions for the reader to
answer.
It is eclectic and covers a wide
spectrum of feelings and emotions. The reader can’t help but wonder at the
poet’s mental state, his mental processes of creativity and how his emotions
sidle when he was writing.
Powerful poems like Suicide, Bridge, Tomorrow’s Face, The End of
the Song and a lot of others in the collection deserves to be appreciated
for their prowess with words and imagination.
Garko did an amazing work with
this collection and even though he has not found his own voice yet in the world
of art he will no doubt be an artist to contend with in the near future.
For anything, the elegance of
expression, the grammatical acuity, the precision with details and the lofty
literariness will never go unnoticed.
The form and structure of the
collection are subjects for discussions for formalists and structuralists. The
diction demands careful vetting and the collection has a general ability to enthral
the reader into the world of the art and by so doing sharpens his own
imagination and creativity too.
After all said and done, leafing
through this collection will be like going through a literature co-authored by
the author and the reader together. The reader feels the emotions embedded
beneath the poems beaming in his imagination too, and this in itself is a
renowned literary feat.
It is recommended for all lovers
of art and poetry.
***
Eugene Yakubu is a book critic,
reviewer and storyteller. He loves art and nature; and spends his time reading
beautiful novels and writing stories.
Comments
Post a Comment
We love to hear from you, share your comment/views. Thanks