The poetry of breath

January Gestures

By Nengi Josef Ilagha

73pp; Treasure Books

I read the whole of January Gestures, Nengi Ilagha's poetic offering, on a Lagos-bound bus, and Abuja to Lagos is a long haul by road as anyone who has ever undertaken the journey will attest.

The book, uniquely composed according to the days in the calendar, pulsed with harvested electricity, humming and modulating across the pages I read, replacing my temporal tedium with a sublime contemplation of time, seasons, life, happenstances and the elusive concept called destiny.

After my arrival, I have had cause to revisit the collection. In terms of conception and even execution, it is a departure from a whole body of writing by poets of Ilagha's generation. Between one line of his poetry and another, Ilagha transports his audience from a world of the quotidian into the quaintly quizzical.

Listen to the poet, for example, on day fifteen: "January comes with/Its barracks of heroes/ And unknown soldiers." This, as Nigerians would attest, is a rather pretty way to put what is tritely called ‘Armed Forces Remembrance Day'.

Listen to the poet again on day twenty-two: "The harmattan blunts the nostrils/With a mist of cotton buds/Dead air parades the lanes of the wind/Breath drags itself into the long slimy tail/of catarrh, full of milk and moisture."

In the midst of the deafening clamour of "autumn", "spring" and "summer" from a lot of poets who grew and came to maturity in one of the foremost rainforest regions of the world, Ilagha asserts his identity with his homeland and its unique weather, taking us back to an infancy that most are too quick to consign to oblivion.

We find in this poet a stern warrior against the claims of obsolescence in human experience; we also experience in this poet a perfect celebratory voice for what we assign (hastily) to the rustic and mundane.

Ilagha manages to touch us so lightly with history, with passion, with contrition, with bodily manifested desire and with mortality, always with a poet's unyielding grasp of the syntax of the sublime. If one word could ever describe a collection, "fresh" would be that word in the case of January Gestures.

The poet is playful yet grave, discursive but not journalistic, alert to the personal as he is to the public. I came away from this collection wondering what could be responsible for Ilagha's being so little known outside the charmed charcoal circle of Nigerian poetry.

What would be obvious shortcomings in such an ambitious collection as January Gestures, Ilagha strives to turn into positives. One comes away thinking that the poet could have dared to say more on certain days, that he could have heeded W.B. Yeats in packing a lot of personal stuff in salt, that he could have avoided the element of pandering to his day job as a speech writer.

But one cannot deny the grace and flow of the poetry, thin as it may be in places. Ilagha is a poet who dares to break moulds. This poet is true to the geography of his Niger Delta, his poetry is tessellated, topical and ticklish.

In places though, it must be said, the poet is too playful. On day thirty one, we hear him singing in the backyard: "The month keeps its metrical feet/And extends the meaning into twice/Its normal length, serpentine squeamish/Like a mamba cut in half."

Salary earners and market women know there is nothing as asymmetric as the end of month in January. And the truly rustic know that there is nothing squeamish about a bisected snake. It is, of all ill fates, the worst; the most homicidal of all.

The idea that a poet can indeed honour the "breath of each day" - that one ought to reckon and to rejoice, that life is a gift, that encounters are inevitable, that every human being can bless and be blessed in a day, that restoration is possible, that there is no necessary exclusivity between the spiritual and the physical, that plurality is the natural order of nature - these ideas amongst others, are the fundaments of Ilagha's collection.

Even as he is a poet of ideas, he is also charmingly visceral. On day thirteen, we hear the poet musing aloud thus: "Leave your dentures marked, if you will/To say you got that far/Bite disarmingly/Don't draw blood/I quake all over/for the blood you won't shed/When you plunder me silly..."

Do not read this book at your breakfast table, the poet can and does toy with human appetite.

In-between the lines one catches glimpses of the struggle in the life of the poet. He pleads his case in verse at the failed lovers' tribunal as he plays possum in his self-erected confessional. Ilagha is catholic in his sweep of poetic material and a free spirit who is as willing to be led as he is to impose order.

Here is a poet who consciously courts the attention of his audience; doing what he can, when he can, to narrow the distance between himself and his readers.

Everyone should read January Gestures. It is one book that has the germ of conviviality without sacrificing gravity.

This book is also a sign that this poet is capable of more, much more, than we find within his reflections of the month of January.

January Gestures has intrinsic value in that it teaches to dare; it also teaches to celebrate and to preserve the fleeting.

Ipadeola is the author of ‘The Rain Fardel'