Origins of the Syma Species: African Poetry Book
Autor Tares Oburumu Cuvânt înainte de Kwame Dawesen Limba Engleză Paperback – mar 2024
Winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets, Tares Oburumu’s collection is a brief history of where he came from: Syma, a neglected oil-producing region of Nigeria. After growing up with a single mother in the creek- and brook-marked region, and himself now a single parent, Oburumu examines single parenthood and how love defines family circles. Mixing music, religion, and political critique, Origins of the Syma Species evokes pasts and futures.
Inspired by the relative chaos found in the origin of things, Oburumu’s poems explore how the beauty of chaos binds us to our ancestral roots. In his poems Oburumu identifies with anyone who is a single parent or is dealing with the lonely trauma of a broken home. His poems instill hopefulness in a world that has the means to throw many into poverty and agony.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496237026
ISBN-10: 1496237021
Pagini: 72
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.12 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria African Poetry Book
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496237021
Pagini: 72
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.12 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Seria African Poetry Book
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Tares Oburumu lives in Yenagoa, the south side of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. He is the winner of the Green Author Prize for poetry. His works have appeared in Connotation Press, Bluepepper, Woven Tales Press, Afrocritik, and Eunoia Review, among many other journals.
Extras
Emerging
The night enters my solitude through the Romani clock
on my wall;
a warm circle of lamp gives light to the thousand words
before me,
the great Langstons, poetic not political, on a desk.
The window opens a new river,
a still bed accentuates the meaning of sleep at the far end.
Childhood & towboats reveal the art of a wall gecko
using the silhouettes as its trap.
A moth flies in semicircles, afraid of the dark.
The holy shelf wants a touch, a simple church; a worship.
My mind like fingers flips through the people,
their historical facts, wars, the geography of love.
I give all the glory to the first book I read at the age of 5
my very first entry into lighteners.
Glory to you, aurora, still open to me, colorful like photo albums,
at 32.
Legendary is its broken spine, covered yet in gold dust,
that never closes, never opens, though like Saint Gertrude’s hands
clasped in prayer, it is the most blessed image of my father’s past,
the horizontal purple in its oaken shelf
sharing love & history, light & darkness with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,
now a glasshouse.
This building as Christine, Biafra’s mistress,
repainted it with defunct phrases
in her love letter to a child that died, after they divided the country
with handsaws
into two rivers, was once a room they brought by picture
to a land heaving to bridge the gap between what was, what keeps coming
as if there is no end to the grand work on nation building or progress.
As if heaven was not built by man.
After the fall of the sun-stained windows, a door unhinged its bolted grief
to let a boy crawl out of loss, to what would not define the living.
Above him floats, like a boat off sail, what was imagined; the disruption
of a postcolonial page.
In him now is another house, one they are building without brick, iron,
or glass.
One book-layer, not quite angry,
quite satisfied not with an unread culture of nettles
growing from split ground,
steps heavy on the tendrils & the question mark
seen at the end of survival sags
sinks beneath me standing footless beside an infertile block
or word asking not to know where to plant the sun.
Asking to know when we should all fall down on love
with our knees & restart the biblical work of Eden.
Playing from a street piano the notes of my coming out
my father’s portion of garden seems not a good place
to neither be bright nor be beautiful,
neither be flower nor tares.
Tunnel
What if there is no light at the end,
will Sasha still call it a tunnel, or passage?
That is the north we are indebted to
the moon in the dream we have been looking for.
We, dying in little lives here in William’s Town
in a remote island, almost a house with lights turned off,
have not been taught enough how to be dark in the light
& light in the dark, or face the sun
with all our reading lamps.
Along the blue terraces of the Batham River,
you could see the swimmers, water-light, parsing oil vessels.
The happy swans go down into the deep,
the kingfisher, phosphorus, nods approval.
One natural light, by staying with them,
keeps burning out the lamps at sea.
The other surprised by gas flaring butterflies,
not too bright for a future expressed as hourglass
(neither hope nor a sybarite’s delight) brings the sun
& its sands down to the night.
I thought, being black as a bastille lacking windows,
I’d seen you, once, blue in Sirius.
Twice have I mistaken you for who I was,
an explorer & believer excessive in the color white—part of the dark.
Understand why I dive into an endless ship, wrecked,
lying at the bottom of my soul,
always blue by my keel.
Why I dive into the waves, dreams first before the head.
Then this fate I have been given;
is a chance to find your own light.
The night enters my solitude through the Romani clock
on my wall;
a warm circle of lamp gives light to the thousand words
before me,
the great Langstons, poetic not political, on a desk.
The window opens a new river,
a still bed accentuates the meaning of sleep at the far end.
Childhood & towboats reveal the art of a wall gecko
using the silhouettes as its trap.
A moth flies in semicircles, afraid of the dark.
The holy shelf wants a touch, a simple church; a worship.
My mind like fingers flips through the people,
their historical facts, wars, the geography of love.
I give all the glory to the first book I read at the age of 5
my very first entry into lighteners.
Glory to you, aurora, still open to me, colorful like photo albums,
at 32.
Legendary is its broken spine, covered yet in gold dust,
that never closes, never opens, though like Saint Gertrude’s hands
clasped in prayer, it is the most blessed image of my father’s past,
the horizontal purple in its oaken shelf
sharing love & history, light & darkness with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart,
now a glasshouse.
This building as Christine, Biafra’s mistress,
repainted it with defunct phrases
in her love letter to a child that died, after they divided the country
with handsaws
into two rivers, was once a room they brought by picture
to a land heaving to bridge the gap between what was, what keeps coming
as if there is no end to the grand work on nation building or progress.
As if heaven was not built by man.
After the fall of the sun-stained windows, a door unhinged its bolted grief
to let a boy crawl out of loss, to what would not define the living.
Above him floats, like a boat off sail, what was imagined; the disruption
of a postcolonial page.
In him now is another house, one they are building without brick, iron,
or glass.
One book-layer, not quite angry,
quite satisfied not with an unread culture of nettles
growing from split ground,
steps heavy on the tendrils & the question mark
seen at the end of survival sags
sinks beneath me standing footless beside an infertile block
or word asking not to know where to plant the sun.
Asking to know when we should all fall down on love
with our knees & restart the biblical work of Eden.
Playing from a street piano the notes of my coming out
my father’s portion of garden seems not a good place
to neither be bright nor be beautiful,
neither be flower nor tares.
Tunnel
What if there is no light at the end,
will Sasha still call it a tunnel, or passage?
That is the north we are indebted to
the moon in the dream we have been looking for.
We, dying in little lives here in William’s Town
in a remote island, almost a house with lights turned off,
have not been taught enough how to be dark in the light
& light in the dark, or face the sun
with all our reading lamps.
Along the blue terraces of the Batham River,
you could see the swimmers, water-light, parsing oil vessels.
The happy swans go down into the deep,
the kingfisher, phosphorus, nods approval.
One natural light, by staying with them,
keeps burning out the lamps at sea.
The other surprised by gas flaring butterflies,
not too bright for a future expressed as hourglass
(neither hope nor a sybarite’s delight) brings the sun
& its sands down to the night.
I thought, being black as a bastille lacking windows,
I’d seen you, once, blue in Sirius.
Twice have I mistaken you for who I was,
an explorer & believer excessive in the color white—part of the dark.
Understand why I dive into an endless ship, wrecked,
lying at the bottom of my soul,
always blue by my keel.
Why I dive into the waves, dreams first before the head.
Then this fate I have been given;
is a chance to find your own light.
Cuprins
Foreword by Kwame Dawes
Book 1
Emerging
Acts of a Green House
Tunnel
Parental Guidance for August Children Watching the Movie A Beautiful Mind
My Father’s Last Hope for Water
Illustrations Showing Figures of Speech Left on a Telephone Line Years after the Civil War
Teaching Metaphysics, or Disciplinal Notes on Self-Culture
The Eulogy & a Brief Description of Buckingham House
Surrogacy
Let There Be Lamplight
Maud, or Letter to the White Egrets
Paradise
Syma Minor
How to Love the Boats
Book 2
A Long Walk on Endlessness, the City of J. K. Anowe, the Decembrist
Music, or Immortality
In the Time of the Telephone
Running
How to Love a Girl—Austen College Recital for Pablo Neruda’s Genius
& the I Is the Revolution
The Origin
Note 1—a Vision of Afghanistan
Note 2—Syma
Altar
Notes
Book 1
Emerging
Acts of a Green House
Tunnel
Parental Guidance for August Children Watching the Movie A Beautiful Mind
My Father’s Last Hope for Water
Illustrations Showing Figures of Speech Left on a Telephone Line Years after the Civil War
Teaching Metaphysics, or Disciplinal Notes on Self-Culture
The Eulogy & a Brief Description of Buckingham House
Surrogacy
Let There Be Lamplight
Maud, or Letter to the White Egrets
Paradise
Syma Minor
How to Love the Boats
Book 2
A Long Walk on Endlessness, the City of J. K. Anowe, the Decembrist
Music, or Immortality
In the Time of the Telephone
Running
How to Love a Girl—Austen College Recital for Pablo Neruda’s Genius
& the I Is the Revolution
The Origin
Note 1—a Vision of Afghanistan
Note 2—Syma
Altar
Notes
Recenzii
“Origins of the Syma Species is a supple devotional to the divinity that is movement; Tares Oburumu’s dazzling poetry travels through the fantastic, the extraterritorial, the corporeal, and the spiritual to declare, ‘This life is not mine, it is my mother’s & I am God’s lifeboat.’ Oburumu’s lines brim with restlessness and abundance, limned rich in dust, in pixel, the granular zoomed into like an airport or sudden dream before becoming panoramic—intimacies pointillize among flashes of the war-torn global. Oburumu’s swooping and sweeping aerial views take in continents at a glance even as he holds close the names of his beloved, minding them as they weave through tableaux of ‘national blood’ and empty houses. Origins of the Syma Species is a monumental work, determined to ‘write us / out of shipwreck’ poem after bravura poem.”—Douglas Kearney, author of Sho and Optic Subwoof
“In his poem ‘The Origin,’ Tares Oburumu’s capacity for the arresting line is starkly demonstrated: ‘At the end of my happiness is a house without doors.’ There is something quite memorable about this locution, and it is rich with feeling and clever with its own wit and sophistication. Of course, it helps that it makes sense in the way that the best poetic lines should—in layers and layers of meaning that are enlivened and complicated by what a reader might bring to the idea.”—from the foreword by Kwame Dawes
Descriere
Tares Oburumu’s collection of poems is a brief history of Syma, the neglected oil-producing region of Nigeria he came from, mixing music, religion, and political critique to evoke pasts and futures.