Lonesongs at Dawn

Ogonna Agu is in the department of English at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, now rapidly reestablishing its important educational work after the destruction it suffered during the civil war. He calls the collection of poems he submitted Lonesongs at Dawn. A selection of verses from this volume are printed here. The war inevitably intrudes -its presence is too recent and cruel to be escapable. But the mood is not of violence and anger but of lament as in the lovely elegy for Christopher Okigbo, Widowbird and the Requiem (for Azuka Okakwu). There are poems encompassed in the subtitle Turbulent Moments, but the volume is appropriately designated as Lonesongs, for their sounds are lyric. Overall the mood is a tender one relishing the intimacy of moments of understanding and awareness. mood is not easily sustained, for there are always questions and plaintive accusations. A sense of loss and doubt constantly makes the counterpoint to the comfort of discovery and assurance. But such inner debate, the argument of the poet with himself, is the substance of poetry as Yeats remarked. All in all, in Agu's verse, the quiet is established and sustained among the hovering threats and the vision is of beauty, of a world both fresh and unique: This early morning bloom/appeared like a fluted pumpkin seedling/in the morning dew/. The poet records such a moment and rejoices in it. Readers will share the experience of his questing but ultimately reassuring sense of discovery

Art · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies