By Henry Akubuiro
Oceans in Your Lungs, Zainab Omotayo Raji, 2022, pp. 92
A collection in four parts, Zainab Omotayo Raji’s new poetry volume, Oceans in Your Lungs, declaims of passion, laments of chaos and pain in our roots, yet illuminates hope in the dark. 
Some of the most beautiful poems ever written in the world carol love and nature. Remember Shakespeare’s “Can I Compare You to a Summer Day?”, “She Walks in “Beauty” by Lord Bryon, “Ode to Nightingale” by John Keats, “Annabelle Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvel, etcetera.
The geography of Raj’s Oceans in Your Lungs is saturated with codas of amore, especially in the first part of the collection, where no force on earth could scatter genuine love, be it the end of the world. The poet speaker here drives it home when she declares: “Forever, we will live in the universe/Lighting each other’s footprints/ Like stars complimenting the sky at night/ Our love story will be a folklore/Told to the ends of the earth” (p.3).
Love produces sibilant melodies on bedsheets even when one of the partners isn’t around. Imagination of pleasant memories, therefore, takes the place of the idolised persona, filling the gaping void. Hence: “Tonight on my lonely bed/ I imagine you beside me/And I sleep tranquility/Like I am in paradise” (p. 5).
Oceans in Your Lungs celebrates the bambino and the joy of procreation. The poet parallels the gift of a child to a most profound wonder embedded in a body and the brightest sun creating a pathway in a man’s journey of life. The poem is also an apologia for the melanin, as the speaker in “My Child” describes the bambino as a perfect work of art by the Almighty, whose dark skin is as luminous as melon seeds.
This child is presented as the father’s legacy to the next generation, says the mother; a compass to the castle in the moon, though the newborn baby is just learning to walk: the first miracle on his journey of life.
The poet’s imagery and metaphors are like floral constructs which emit scent and envisions a ravishing beauty. In. “Blooming”, the speaker’s veneration of the love of her life is likened to incandescent lamps, and the hyperbole of lips colliding with each other produces a heightened tenor. The poet also likens the effect of the warm kiss to the current of electricity.
In another poem, “Firecracker”, the image of romantic persona idealising love is painted on a canvas. Call her a slave to love, and you aren’t mistaken. It’s for a reason, though: love makes the world go round, especially true love. There is no momentary langour in this section. So we hear: “Each best of your heart/Is a lesson on true love/And our love/Is proof that miracles exist” (p. 15).
In the second section of the collection, the poet talks about anxiety and birth. She poetises about fear, which is a divorce from certainly. But a lover can always intervene to overturn the angsty air surrounding the partner when on the low, as we find in “Trust, where the lover declares: “I will be your propeller/Helping your dangling worries find flight. I will be your angel…” (p. 24).
The contradictions of life echoes in “This World”, where each day is a harbinger of births and deaths, sonorous songs and sad songs. Some fortunate ones reap where they didn’t sow, while some hard working ones eat the bread of misery. It’s an unpredictable world!
The poet, in the title poem, published on pages 35-6, xrays mistrust and dissonance in a relationship. It offers a lifeline for stocktaking amid an augury of an unhappy ending, with a sense of mirage.
Grief bedecks the opening verses in the third section on pains. The poet weaves an ode to fear and also recalls the ravages of Covid-19 pandemic, accompanied by empty streets, decaying bodies and apocalyptic visitations on mankind.
The poet goes about her poetic project with control and assured vim that glides and turns attention such that, when you get to the last section of the collection entitled “Hope As Sun Rays”, there is an overwhelming urge to turn the pages one more time. “Transcendent” poem towards the end is preachy, telling us that downtimes can be a foundation to build a better life. Zainab Raji is a poet deserving of a loud peal.