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Title: Dispossessed
Author: James Eze
Publisher: Fasihi, Canada
year: 2019
Pagination: 121
REVIEWER: Henry Akubuiro
James Eze’s debut poetry collection, dispossessed, was greeted with instant hurrahs from the press. Aside from winning the 2020 ANA Poetry Prize, the book has travelled across the world, raking up enviable figures across North America and Europe. This didn’t come as a big surprise, however. Eze’s dispossessed collection is a product of long gestation.
In this collection of 77 poems, Eze deploys eecumings casing to give wings to his dire musings, nay, riding on the vein of imagist poetry with a directness and economy of words that recreate the experiences of the self and wider objects. Eze has a way with words, and his poetry blooms with felicities and lush images like dahlia and rose in the wild. There is an overflow of lyricism, Eze being a musician, but there is no overt adherence to poetic metres.
This poetry volume is a canvass deployed by Eze to chart the course of three stages of life: from innocence, transgression to atonement. These border on the existential orbit as it affects the spirit, the soul and the body, while also revolving around three stages of human evolution vis: childhood, youth and old age. Eze’s dispossessed, thus, offers us a lens with which we appreciate the anxieties of life, its triumphs and persecutions as we pass through the stations of life.
Seen from another perspective, it revolves around celestial borderland — of sunrise, noon and sunset —which play significant roles in the pilgrimage of man towards self realisation. Little wonder, Eze’s dispossessed tees off with “innocence,” which dovetails into “transgression” before levitating towards “atonement” as its apotheosis.
In “innocence”, the poet creates a persona off the track of man’s cradle of innocence to define the transition of his life’s trajectory, first, by discovering his place in the cosmos, which explains why poems of childhood are wholesale in the first section of the collection.
Eze’s merry song of innocence is the effervescent laughter of the sunflower grinding him on the whetstone of metaphors. He sees himself as the cadenced growl of starving bellows, and a song in want of an audience. He declares in “here I am” that “he is born for this moment”, a wayfarer, troubadour and minstrel at the crossroads.
A poem like “when I was a boy” contains remembrances that go back in time. The innocence of the persona finds expression in childhood trifles and fantasies. The poet carols: “when I was a boy/i often ran naked and blind into the rain/singing songs that even the winds had no breath to whisper into the ear of tree”. Clothed in the sheets of glistening rain, the speaker immerses himself in the ceremony of innocence, amid nostalgic reminiscences. In “enugu”, Eze produces a “confetti of memories cast on a mirror” to depict the city, and, in “idoto”, he seduces the reader with an apologia for the legendary Idoto, inspired by a first-time pilgrimage to the river in honour of legendary Chris Okigbo.
In the second section of dispossessed, Eze departs from the path of childhood and self-validation to discover the landscape within and around him in “transgression”. Here, the wayfarer appreciates his milieu and his role in making the most of what’s therein from different angles. Thus, love becomes an instrument of deification and, loss, an important part of man’s experiences. Eze’s love poems aren’t strictly a Romeo kind of love song to his Juliet —the poet, rather, morphs into a raconteur expressing strong feelings about his country which has taken up the toga of a wayward lover. These deceptive love poems are verses that throw up questions about social fidelity.
The love poems in “transgression” section kick off with “i found love” on page 35, a poem which has already been turned into a hit song by the poet. The persona declares to the lover: “I found love when I found you/two tender buds blooming into petals on each other’s arms”.
The third part of the collection, “atonement” opens up generational questions, which echoes have refused to be stifled. This section also reflects the agelong conversation between literature and commitment whereby the poet speaks for the society, interrogating its socio-political malaise.
The poem that encapsulates this section is the titular poem, “dispossessed”, on page 87. The concrete nature of this poem, written in cantos, hints that all isn’t well with the superstructure. It recollects the Nigerian Civil War that robbed a section of the country a fraction of its essence. Though peace came after the war, the poet reminds us that some of the issues that led to the war are still with us. The poet sues for peace, while warning his brethren to be wary of another “rain bearing clouds”. He calls on Nigerians to begin to see the goodness in others and not just ourselves alone. He laments about the debt trap in the country as a new slave chain by the western powers. He goes further to denounce the superpowers’ lust for war, while condemning descrimination on racial grounds. Above all, the poet preaches for global peace: “we have waged wars for eons and failed/it’s time to give love one more chance//let’s repossess what we dispossessed ourselves/to recompense humanity’s arrested progress”.
Dispossessed, as a journey of life, is experiential, but its essence reflects a communal voyage. In terms of deftness of craft, maturity and poetic vision, dispossessed is a staggering poetic achievement.
