In one of the best of its kinds ever written as introduction to an African Poetry Book Fund collection, the Ghanaian poet and critic Kwame Dawes, one of the editors of the series, has the following to say about the Nigerian poet ‘Gbenga Adeoba’s debut full-length collection of poems titled, succinctly, Exodus:

In the latter part of this remarkable collection of poems by Nigerian poet ‘Gbenga Adeoba, the poet explores memory—personal memory of the meaning of home, of displacement, of exile, and of loss. By then, he has already written one of the most elegant stretches of poetry that explores, with tenderness and power, the function of the imagination in helping us contend with what Toni Morrison argues is the core dilemma of our century, of our time.

Barring his masterful voice at expressing particular themes in verse, from the beginning of Exodus through its middle to its end, Adeoba has simply written one of the most elegant stretches of poetry out of Africa in the last five years. Indeed a thoroughly precocial book of poems, Exodus, being a debut full-length collection from the poet, comes to us fully formed. The reason for this impressive, even magisterial, quality is that his poetic voice is assured in tone, graceful in subject, and controlled in versification. We are in an age of formlessness in the traditional sense in poetry, but reading and rereading Adeoba’s offerings put us in touch with the rhythmically caressing and textually beautiful poetry of such poetic luminaries like W. H. Auden, J. P. Clark-Bekederemo, and Derek Walcott, who, at least thematically, is a precursor to the poet. One wants to take the best of these poets in whole: like Auden’s ‘The More Loving One’ and ‘September 1, 1939’, Clark-Bekederemo’s ‘Easter, 1976’ and ‘Night Rain’, and Walcott’s ‘Homecoming: Anse La Raye’ and ‘Prelude’. The same expressive control, the discipline against excess, that defines those poems is present across the poems featured in Exodus. Adeoba, writing about subjects like migration and exile, especially the supervening chaos of such movements—subjects that read spent on the hands of lesser poets—brings us back to that gluttonous state of mind for what he has to offer and we are there precisely because the poet understands when enough is really enough.

In ‘Half Acre of Water’, an occasional poem about ‘a mass funeral [that] was held on Friday in Salerno, Italy, for 26 young Nigerian women who drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea’ (reported by Sahara Reporters on November 17, 2017), Adeoba begins his poem at the setting of the place of their death, anchored by the avian character of such vast watery clime that, brilliantly, starts the lines:

Gulls, too, are fleeing
that portion where their
bodies were drowned, those
Nigerian women, 26 of them.

The poem moves between the facts of the poet’s subject and his imagination. But instead of succumbing the imagination to the whims of the facts, the latter become subsidiary to the former, a mere background, and thus make such imaginatively excellent pronouncements as the following to our reading delight and introspecting sadness:

They huddle even in death;
their mouths shaped as though
they wanted to say
what we do not know,

how far they had gone,
that November morning,
in the sure calm of dawn,

before the sea, ageless,
raised the cost of passage.

But Adeoba also raises the standard of using news to make poetry to aureate stature, especially by how he ends the poem: quietly sad and suavely dispiriting, the end reverberates the beginning. The birds have not fled far from the sea but stay, if grievously aghast, to witness the final resting of the drowned in a strange land:

But there are no words now,

only the fragments
of lived lives flung about
in that half acre of water;

the birds pitching their grief
from a distance,
mourning the loss—

these women that would rest
in the Italy they never knew.

‘Half Acre of Water’ is far from Adeoba’s best poem in Exodus, but it is one of the longer poems therein and shows the best qualities of the poet: his imaginative powers, expressive strengths, and his rather staunch control over his topical material, the former standing Sentinel against the seething, invasive impulse of the latter. In the recent climate of Nigerian poetry, this triadic combination is a bit rare. In addition to these qualities, moreover, the great attribute of Adeoba’s poetry is its unpretentious independence: it hardly lends itself to the exegetical fancy of the critic. Like ‘Half Acre of Water’, the poetry avails itself to the reader quite satisfactorily and democratically. His poetry is often easy enough to read, affecting enough to reread, seductive enough in its quiet beauty to keep one reading on, and at the same time strong enough to fortify the aesthetic position holding that the most poetic or imaginative sense is often made possible by a discipline of execution rather than a fanciful feel for the ornate and complicated.

In reading ‘Number’, the shortest poem in Exodus as an analytical contrast to ‘Half Acre of Water’, for instance, what help does the following neat expression of jarring gore need from the critic except the courtesy of marveling at the graceful craftsmanship that makes such disciplined articulation, in both form and sense, possible:

Last night, kids here couldn’t
gather; so, they muttered elegies
for their game of numbers.
There are more bodies than pebbles.

Is the last line the content of the kids’ elegiac song or the poet’s overriding statement? Or both? Here, the ambiguous stand undeniably accomplished. Set in Baga, in the northeastern part of Nigeria in the state of Borno, the poem is heavy with the horrifying history of the Boko Haram attacks in those parts a decade ago, one of which is now known as Baga Massacre: a series of mass killings between 3 January and 7 January 2015, ending thousands of civilian lives. For ‘Numbers’, a lulu of a poem about such a devastating experience cannot be more nano than that. I would have said unless the poem is the Israeli poet Dan Pagis’s ‘Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway Car’ or the American Ilya Kaminsky’s ‘Question’, but even though one of those poems is shorter, they can tell you anything at all only if you already know something about their context and allusion, their achievement depending on a special knowledge. On the other hand, Adeoba’s ‘Number’, even without the knowledge of the terrorist killings to which the poet alludes beneath the title of the poem, is self-revealingly suggestive and vice versa: the world is too wrecked to be in want of the poem’s context to understand its universal message, which is to say in a short precise manner that the world is chaotic, racked with violence, conflict, and war. These self-revealing and universally minded instances throughout Adeoba’s collection are the testimonies to his poetic lessons learned complete.

Exodus has two great strengths, both already hinted at. The first is compression and the second is moderation. The two are not synonymous because a short, seemingly compressed poem, for instance, can still suffer moderation by being too short and a long poem tautly expressed can suffer the same by ending too soon. Adeoba’s claim to a poetic intelligence that differentiates him from his peers is irrigated, sustained and catapulted by his refined sense of moderation because too little and too long of a poet’s point in a poem are both too dangerous a chariot for either narrative content or lyricism. Such a baggy chariot often drives the poet rather than the other way around. In addition, Adeoba shows us, particularly in ‘War Notes’, ‘Epitaphs’ and ‘Noah’, why compression is the cherry on top of poetic intelligence and moderation of expression just as sweet and useful.

That graceful intelligence is particularly displayed in the nearly closemouthed devastation of the suggestive ‘Epitaphs.’ A logical continuation, however horrific the reality, of ‘Numbers’, the poem is about the dour ambiences of the aftermath of war: when the streets are smoky with death and the lands, stained with the rotten fleshes of the dead. Any attempt at reminiscences, if not accompanied by the same torturous intensity of the war, is at least attended with the reality of doing the dead the inevitable injustice of not remembering with exacting accuracy the condition of their deaths:

The last epitaph in Baga was painted
on an empty bottle labeled,
“One for the road.”
Booms birth changing sceneries.
Soon, there are mass graves everywhere
with shrubs as landmarks.
Survivors leave, with drunks saying,
“Epitaphs are cheap memories for the dead.”

As a purely aesthetic artefact—which in this sense refers to a product of an agile poetic imagination offering the most pleasurable reading experience because its meaning is so perfectly integrated into form and vice versa—the poem called ‘Threshold’, which appears at the earlier parts of the book, is my favourite. The poem, since the first time I read it, has been coming back to me for the singular achievement of its central figurative anchorage: a simile so perfectly placed it reinforces the Aristotelian notion that the command of metaphor is indeed a mark of ingenuity. In the poem, Adeoba writes about his visit to his ‘grandfather’s house for the first time after his death’ and that is just about what the whole poem, in its taut expression, is all about. However, the avian simile, suggestive of the idyllic, the peaceful, and the tranquil intervened by a moment of a natural dazzle in flight, speaks to the implied grief at the heart of the speaker, it speaks to the quiet regret of not having come to the house sooner because what the speaker remembers is as fine as any remembrance can be: how the dead lived instead of how he cannot be seen or talked to again. The poem reads in its entirety as thus:

Eleven years after his passing,
I stand at the threshold
of that balcony where he would sit;
the music of his lore, riffling the air
like the lifting of birds;
his voice, in trickles,
undoing the knots of silence.

The poem is moderate in language, figurations, and line-break. The poet, upon visiting that nostalgic place, suspends the mournful kind of grief in his heart and instead remembers the lived greatness of the dead—(‘the music of his lore, riffling the air / like the lifting of birds’)—in just seven lines weighty with memories. This notable sense of the moderate and condensed, in both diction, lyricism, and storytelling, hence makes Exodus first an impressive, then a tantalizing, collection. Itself one of the tightest books of poems I have read from the continent, it only collects some twenty-nine poems with varying lengths in which the longest poem is a poem called ‘Seafarers’ (it is, quite customary of the poet, deserving of its length) and the shortest, called ‘Numbers’, is just four lines short and would have been longer with a single line more just as the former would have been poorer with a single line less. He is the last poet I read from the country to truly take the Yorùbá adage to the heart of his art that: ṣókí lọbẹ̀ oge. (Moderate is the soup of fancy.) In Exodus, Adeoba curbs excess as much as he curates proportional excellence of each poem that makes the book a magisterial whole. He is the sort of poet to whom the assignation of the word phenomenal is rightly befitting.