Review: Animashaun's Gift

The woman I used to live with used to receive, from time to time, gift boxes of fruit from Harry and David. These were among our favorite packages to sign for, and chief among the pleasures often waiting in the nest of packing straw would be, for me, the perfectly ripe pears. The gift of pears, in the title poem of Abayomi Animashaun’s first volume (The Giving of Pears, Black Lawrence Press, 2010) has the power to attract iguanas and angels, and, in the wake of death, to comfort maidens. Animashaun’s poems set out similarly to offer consolation and vision, to set these in the balance against violence and loss. Pears are easy to grow, but often difficult to ripen or to pick at the precise moment of perfect ripeness; the same might be said, and on the basis of this book should be said, of poems.

I like best the poems here that weave through a warped view of the quotidian the woof of striking language. In “The Tailor and His Strings,” for instance, Animashaun constructs a little fable of renewal (old men go to the village tailor for strings to tie around their chests, measured to fit “the diameter of each weakened heart,” and are rejuvenated by these figures for “music from youth”) with a linguistic plainness and precision that heightens the strangeness of the tale. And “The Visit” narrates a (literally and figuratively) chilling visit from Death that wrings from the speaker a shocking sacrifice in the name of filial pietism. Death warns: “Your father / Will lose his sight again. // It is not good for the dead / To suffer a second blindness.” The speaker must choose whether to save his father’s vision among the dead by giving up his own or that of his unborn son. The conclusion is quietly devastating:

In the dark world of the unborn,
My son, playing quietly by the sea,
Forgets the curved mechanism of light,
Inside a small fish.

Too often, though, the poems’ own vision is blurred by flat or imprecise language. In “Ancestors,” the pot in which meat cooks for soup, its aroma attracting the speaker’s dead grandfather, is “tittering on the stove,” the giggle as out of place in the soundscape of howling wind and the old songs of wandering spirits as it would be at a funeral. And when the speaker removes the meat from the pot, he “sever[s] it in two.” I’m sure the spirit of the grandfather is grateful for the sacrifice left for him along with a “bowl of cold water,” but the redundancy in the phrase at this climactic moment of the poem ruined my appetite. Elsewhere, I find some of the poems to be overly explicit in their drawing of morals. Does “History Lesson,” for example, need to juxtapose the intimate and the historical in precisely so overdetermined a way as this:

Did those leaders who went to Berlin
In 1885, when the sought to open a ‘dark continent’,
Did they know of my need to ravage your breasts
Holding you against the cold stove?

The strongest section of this volume is, perhaps, “The Other Testament,” in which Animashaun rewrites Biblical narratives with one eye toward the grittily demystifying vision familiar from, say, Bulgakov’s rewriting of the Passion in The Master and Margarita, and the other, maybe, on Christopher Okigbo’s “Distances” sequence. Even in these poems, though, I wish here were at once more circumspect and more craftsmanlike. Here, for comparison and your reading pleasure, are a couple of stanzas from that sequence’s third poem:

In the scattered line of pilgrims
bound for Shibboleth
in my hand the crucifix
the torn branch the censer

In the scattered line of pilgrims
from Dan to Beersheba
camphor iodine choloroform
either sting me in the bum

And here are a couple of stanzas from Animashaun’s “David”:

The old shepherd who brought the news
Said: he’s in the mountain, naked,
Armed with a sword and a catapult,
Raving about letting fly a stone,
Rocking a giant to the ground,

And stabbing him complete.
The old man, his head now buried
And sobbing uncontrollably, continued:
The man he murdered was no man at all,
But my boy of eleven, just learning to tend sheep.

Like Okigbo, Animashaun aggressively exposes a malignant hallucination deep in the scriptural tissues. But where the poet of a generation ago (Okigbo was killed in battle at Nsukka in 1967) draws power from implication and the economy of metonym, Animashaun spells out tragedy so that there’s little room left for the imagination. Where Okigbo weaves a subtle pattern of sonic repetition through his lines – the sibiliance of “scattered” continues through “Shibboleth,” “crucifix,” and “censer,” the short “a” of “scattered” is repeated in “hand,” “branch,” “Dan” and “camphor” – Animashaun relies on the shock of the situation to carry the lines (which leads, I think, to the reliance on the overcharged “raving,” on the adverbial modification of “uncontrollably,” and on the surface pathos of the concluding line.

I am aware of the danger of appearing to beat one poet of Nigerian descent with the work of one of the greatest English-language Nigerian poets, and it’s the rare first volume by any poet that’s going to stand up to comparison with Okigbo. It would be no more fair to put this book’s “Sunday Mornings at the Barber Shop” upside Derek Walcott’s visit to the Castries barbershop in Omeros, but comparison is one to clarify the shape and the stakes of a poetic project. Animashaun is laudably interested in big and important issues that get well beyond the self-obsession often on display in these days of the navel-directed poetic gaze. I look forward to his riper poems, to the work he produces when he trusts the subjects, their inherence in the objects and agents he examines, and the effects of language turned upon itself. Then, I think, the giving of poems might measure up to the power he here ascribes to the giving of pears.