A REVIEW OF "HOLDING RIVERS" by Jamiu Ahmed



A REVIEW OF “HOLDING RIVERS”
(The Birth of a metaphorical god)

Poetry is undoubtedly known for its language quality and artistic value which involves a lot of mental intuition and sound reasoning, which could be traced back to the 15th and 16th century which are the renaissance era.
It's widely known for its imaginative comparison that's expressed via simile, metaphor or allegory and its evocative power which may lead to emotional purgation.
The evolvement of poetry and metaphor over the years made the creative thinkers and great minds set a standard paradigm for artistic language and poetic aestheticism, Which are what distinguished “Poetry” from other of forms literature.
Some modern scholars refuted obscurantism and proposed that there shouldn't be a distinct language set aside for poetry because intricacy and ambiguity are not what makes good poetry but rather a vivid description and concrete imagery that must appeal to all physical senses.
The concern of a Poet is to bridge the gap between his poem and his teeming audience, ranging from the thematic content or the discourse of the poem to the form, structure and artistic language of the poem.
I have come across different poems from different conventional Poets from around the world, with a different view and mode of conveying their artistic freedom and creativity, for true creativity comes from originality as vice versa. Thus, a new poem should birth new imagery and figurative expression.
My journey through “Holding rivers” the collection of poems by Adeniran Ogooluwa Joseph made me realized from the depth of the artistic languages that poetry is indeed the total freedom of creativity.
Let me lead you to the thematic content of the title. “Holding rivers” could be a metaphor for the childhood memories and experiences that had bottled up into the emotional growth and psychological life of the persona.
“To be told tales is to walk into nothing like memories of my father's picture”
These could be traced to a couple of lines from the poem titled “Holding rivers” from the collections.
“my shadow is a home of pastoral poetry and i am telling it stories about my father who left on a fine day to the gathering of ashes”
He went further to convince me more about these haunting memories.
“i don't know what name we bear after the wind stole my mother's voice to supplant nothing; we are not sad but unhappy”
He concluded with;
“i have named some things like memories holding the vacancy of invalid speech in my veins”
This sent me to in-depth thinking, of course, there are times we feel like voicing out our pains and tears but no one is there to listen so we learn the language of silence upon the hushed night. Who cares about us.
The artistic language of Adeniran Joseph and the effective mode of communicating self feelings made me dig further into his poems where I found “The song of afternoon children”. There are times where growing up as a child is as unease as dancing to the sound from the whip we were battered with.
“when we queue like masquerades, children playing the saxophone in their compounds, they send us into our mother's thighs with beating, and we do not know how to express our angry feelings”
Many children were being deprived of their voices and real languages, which may lead them to think if they were worth the voices because they were denied of themselves. Parents,  teachers and guides should learn from this didactic expression of Adeniran Ogooluwa Joseph and learn that a child shouldn't be abnegated of their true voices, for they are the children of tomorrow.
“Holding rivers” doesn't express only nostalgic memories, it tells the tales of survival and bitter experience of a growing child. These could be identified in the “Lyrics of a calm river”
“I thought I learnt the meaning of nature buried somewhere too beautiful to be defined; Not in my nightmares where the struggle is a cooked bean eaten by the sands”
I am moved to shed tears when I read “What we pray for.” It's a sad reality of life, living and survival depicted artistically in a poem. It tells about the life we live in and the position we found ourselves in, which are often not determined by us and we aren't powerful enough to change it but to pray.
“'We pray for survival as though we are in a moving, dead truck. Our father is home of spiritual healing. So we hold each healing in pieces of verbs because there is no room like weakness in the house of fire everywhere is burnt into ashes of nothingness”
The expression and diction of this collection are vivid, concrete, witty and depth-filled. The joy of a Poet is for the teeming audience to access his poem and be able to determine the discourse of that particular poem.
“Something is happening: they are selling boys, from their mothers' stomachs. not new. not sad. not happiness. but fading glory"
These are lines from “Living in between the lines”. The language used is lucid and easily accessible.
I am forced to read “Fake Pictures” and I laud the metaphors in the poem.
“my last name is a home finding its feet in the city of nightmares”
As of now, I'm convinced that Adeniran Ogooluwa Joseph is not only a Poet but also a metaphorical god. Truly metaphor is the bedrock of poetic aestheticism, without the spice of metaphors and other poetic devices, a poem may lose its artistic value. The true artistic quality of a poem comes from the birth of metaphors and relatable imagery.
Adeniran Joseph was able to balance the usage of language and the essence of the poems in the collection. He made use of metaphors and similes to form concrete imagery to drive home his he(art).
Clearly, “Holding Rivers” is not only justified as a collection of poems but a memoir that entails graphic memories that run forever.

©® Jamiu Ahmed



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_For the things that become part of us_


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