Kofi Awoonor: In Retrospect

Summary

Rediscovery and Other Poems, Kofi Awoonor’s first collection of poems, was published in 1964 by Mbari Press in Ibadan, Nigeria. By a significant coincidence, The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems, 1964–2013, is being released in 2014 by University of Nebraska Press, the first publication in the African Poetry Book Series. In many ways, the new collection offers a unique opportunity for critical retrospection, a backward glance over a half century of Awoonor’s distinguished career as a Guardian of the Sacred Word.

The collection opens with poems that point us in two directions, to a reconciled past and to a future of new challenges and new possibilities. First, to a past where we meet poet and country, young as the new moon and filled with hope and the promise of hope. We see in that past many memorials of struggle, inviting a stroll across a landscape of birds and flowers strewn with graveyards. But we walk arm in arm with the poet, with little fear of mortality. We hold our breath as the poet looks across a new dawn and introduces us to Death holding out his own ‘inimitable calling card’ only to be ushered into

a homestead

resurrected with laughter and dance

and the festival of the meat

of the young lamb and the red porridge

of the new corn.

Here is a constant return to old familiar themes and subjects and the need to postpone dying ‘until the morning after freedom.’ So we find in ‘To Feed Our People’ a gentle plea with the pallbearers and mourners to hold back, just a little bit, while the poet persona attends to a few outstanding concerns:

I still have to meet the morning dew

a poem to write

a field to hoe

a lover to touch

and some consoling to do

I have to go [to India] and meet the sunset.

Above all, we must join the poet in ‘herding the lost lambs home.’ Only then can we pass on to a deserved ancestorhood.