Odia Ofeimun: A City by the Lagoon and the Blessing of Poetry
By Reuben Abati
| Odia Ofeimun  |
Odia Ofeimun,
Lagos of the Poets. Lagos: Hornbill House of Poetry, 2009.
Odia Ofeimun in Lagos of the Poets (2009) defines through his selection of poems and poets, the essential humanizing value of the arts and the subliminal manner in which literature is locked in a continuously dynamic relationship with place and space that is simultaneously spiritual, physical, interactive and artistic.
The subject matter of the collection is Lagos: “lagos of the poets”and what it means as the author puts it to be “lagosed”. But foregrounded here is the city as a subject of imaginative exploration, of romantic and intellectual wrestling, how one city compels a journey within and throws up a creative dialogue with the environment of being and living. Cities are places to be lived in, places of destination and departures, locations of identity, of gain and loss, of great contentions, of continuities and discontinuities, landmarks, culture, relationships and vanishing modes; each city like a living being has a soul, but these souls exist at different planes of value and intersections.
It is an ontological phenomenon that litters the landscape of literary imagining: so much has been written about London, New York, Dublin, Oxford, Cambridge, Morocco, Ibadan, Nsukka, Ife, Jo’Burg, and all spaces where man strives to manage self and nature, and it is understandable because writers are human beings whose sense of place and home and of space provides inspiration for romanticism or revulsion or protest or irridentism. What does it mean to live in a city? What does it mean to pass through a city and to be touched by its special identity? What is it about cities that moves artists to an imaginary land of expression? Catharsis? Identity? Or turmoil.
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