Friday, October 1, 2010

A New Poetry Book

They Can Speak English (my new poetry collection) has just been published in Nigeria. The blurp on the back cover is hereby reproduced below:

Yusuf Adamu’s third collection of poems, his first since Landscapes of Reality (2008), shows him working on a new territory that extends from the politics of language to the question of geography in poetic imagination. Grand, great, as graceful as they are grounded, these poems seem intent on evincing a take on everything: from the veracity and virtue of English language to geopolitics and gender. At the centre of the book’s concern is a kind of a displaced and subtle “elegy” for Nigeria’s miscarried dream and hope, and that elegiac tone permeates the whole book. As W. H. Auden would say: a born poet always looks absolutely natural.

“Yusuf Adamu is indeed a true poet in the mould of Wordsworth and Walcott. Poem after poem, he has an identifying personal tone, a sort of Muse-tainted uniqueness which, in a way, is almost independent of what it portends. The magnitude of his achievement in this collection appears more stunning. They can Speak English quite easily proves why Yusuf Adamu may well have been the most original poet of his generation. Every discerning reader who reads the poems collected here will be delighted by his linguistic subtleties, for he follows the lead of both Brand and Brutus, dazzling in many of the display of imageries that they partake in”.

Ismail Bala
Poet, Critic and Lecturer
Department of English and French, Bayero University Kano, Nigeria

Independence Day Celebrations

As a kid in the years gone by

The nation and we are eager for that day

October first of every year

For our nation is moving forward

Progress is sprawling everywhere

Suddenly the boys stroke and took over

That we move backwards backsliding

Everything in the land made a commodity

Corruption laid sway on the land

Inequality ascends into supremacy

The national purse pauperized by rats

Should my children celebrate October 1st?

Of course yes, I reasoned

It is our nation’s birthday

But looking at where we are today

How our lives are frozen by inaction

How backward we moved over the years

Love for country is questioned

My loyalty too is being questioned

Has my nation done enough…

To deserve my congratulations on its birthday?

September 30, 1999