By Henry Akubuiro
Crazy City, Cash Taiwo, 2022
Poetry entails elegance in language, coherence in meaning, aesthetics and a missingness that compel the reader to search for meanings beyond the surface. This is what you find in Tosin Cash Taiwo’s poetry volume, Krazy City.
Tosin Taiwo offers sometimes cryptic verses, sometimes elusive significations, but the tapestry of his bardic excursion lends him to a poet at home with personal lyrics. He creates random personas that typify oddities, in which we see through the veil of humanity and draw sighs. Sighs are not the only given here, however. Joy comes with reading this ambitious poetry collection in how the poet handles linguistic defamiliarisation. This is a deep poet steeped in symbols.
Relationship and betrayal echo in some of the poems, like in the title poem where love and its ticks and sticks produce discordant tunes to the lover’s mind. Never let love consume you. There is a sense of vertigo that runs through the consciousness of the poet speaker in Taiwo’s verses sometimes, like in “Figures in the Dark” where the mind is not at rest due to environmental realities.
Dark symbols recur in “The Creeper” with shadowy figures moving in the dark, which reflect another love battle with a curious ending. Images of “cutthroats and whores”, “Men with big cigars”, “Ladies in their nudes, lingerie and scarfs,” “My head on fire”, etc., in the poem “Conclave” hints you on the underbelly that surround the speaker’s amorous territory and unending quest to triumphant romance.
In “Heartbeat”, we encounter a sky female juvenile, Rita, who, though out of spotlight, still has her name resonating in many lips for the wrong reasons: “She claims she’s changed –/But a ho remains a ho,/Or so we’ve come to know.” Of course, the stage has been set for someone else, and the plunderers now describe her as old, because they know she has nothing to offer. The lesson: not make yourself too cheap to easily lose relevance.
In “Grace”, the poet depicts a fellon that wears deception like the skin of a reptile. Yes, she is of no good, and guys had better watch who they befriend. Love theme continues in “As Still as Unforging Body of Water”, and here is another deflated persona that the speaker regrets meeting.
“Lost in the Tray of Sales” is one of Taiwo’s poems that you would like to read over again. It interrogates man’s quest for materialism. You will also enjoy reading “A Penny for Your Time”, “Sail Silently”, and others.
Engineer Tosin Taiwo is a professional technical consultant. He bagged his first degree in computer science education from Madonna University, a renowned Catholic Nigeria.
He acquired an MSc in computer systems and networks in Ukraine with first class honours. Driven by passion to write, the author’s works have appeared in publications within and outside Nigeria. His worksinclude Trees by the River, Gentle Touch, and Cast Away.