Mosoto: The quest for inebriated metaphor

Throughout history, many poets, orators and others have used many metaphors to express the emotions stoked in them by love. In his collection of poems, Abiathar Zadok, as a pilgrim-in-love who has encountered these experiences in seasonal flashes, gathers all the metaphors he can find to describe the feelings, the emotions, the promise, the confusion, […]

Throughout history, many poets, orators and others have used many metaphors to express the emotions stoked in them by love. In his collection of poems, Abiathar Zadok, as a pilgrim-in-love who has encountered these experiences in seasonal flashes, gathers all the metaphors he can find to describe the feelings, the emotions, the promise, the confusion, and the hopelessness of it all.

These are chanted, sometimes, in the slur of one intoxicated by the strong spirit of love and, sometimes, in the gushing chatter of one lost in a reverie. Mosoto: The Season of Love’s 56 poems, divided into four sections, give the reader a peculiar picture of the concept.

The fact is that the poet is a sojourner-in-love—the emotion is neither directed at a single subject nor experienced in a single clime. In the first poem of the collection (“Bring it Back”), the poet sees the object of his love as a “thief”: “I never thought you were a thief /Until you stole my heart /From me” and cries forlornly: “Bring it back” for it is the poet’s “precious treasure”.

By this act of ‘theft’, the poet is thrown into a state of eternal slavery (“Eternal Slave”) in which he is “Intoxicated” and “Suffocating”, but “Smiling” and “At peace in gloom”. But he does not take it lying down, for he attempts to gain advantage too (“My Quest”): “May I here state my quest /… /Simple truth in simple terms /That I take your peace from you /To carve in you the greatest thirst”. But, apparently failing to extricate himself from the yoke, regardless of whether he has succeeded in subduing the culprit, the poet gives up all hope and calls on the flames of Hell (another metaphor for the burning embers of love) to “Keep me ever red within /Torture me the best you can /Give me neither rest nor peace”.

In the second section of the book, “Memories of Koko”, where the feeling becomes more physical, the trope of hunger is evoked to describe the various sensations the poet experiences under different intoxicating influences. Apparently yearning for the taste accruable from the intimacy of kissing, the poet calls (in “Sugar Tips”) on his beloved to open the “Honey lid /Strong room where the jam is hid (sic)”, i.e. the “Soft /Succulent /Ritzy lips /Rich and rosy sugar tips”. A religious connotation is given to the experience in “Pilgrimage”, where both the poet and his beloved are “Searching for [a] sacred ground” while “Bound up in a holy kiss”. One exception is, perhaps, the poem, “Spring” where, apparently the hunger is satisfied and the fruit harvested with the arrival of “A baby wrapped in blood from head /…She’s put to bed”.

The next section, “The Royal Hearts”, is where the lines virtually tumble out, one word pushing another. The confusion in “The Search”, the uncertainty in “Quest for Nbamto”, the lamentation in “Heart Break” and restlessness in “Freedom” gush out as if seeking freedom from the captivity of a heart that is “ripped and torn /Yet you do not give a damn /Nor are you moved by the harm”.

In the last group of poems, “Last Dew”, not love as a feeling but love as a being—the person adored—is directly addressed by the use of strong collocations such as “Looking at the moon /I remember you /In the colour of the sun” (“Looking at the Moon”). However, not even the moon or the sun can be to estimate used the loftiness of the beloved: “You aren’t the moon, it doesn’t last /Nor the sun which fears the night”.

Working with both rhyming scheme and free verse, Zadok has produced a poetry collection unique for its lyrical clarity and rhythmic precision, although he appears to struggle with the rhymes or clear diction in some places. One finds it difficult to see the purpose of the following lines in the poem “Pleasant Surprise”, for example, except to somewhat forcefully construct the rhyme: “To unscheduled schedules at will /Is at best in the least ill /So convenient inconvenience”.

As well as a number of missing punctuation marks (“traditions different ways” [p11]), misspellings (“divers doctrines” = diverse doctrines? [p11]), some poems appear to have been duplicated (“Sugar Tips”, for example, appears on pages 17 and 18). On the whole, though, the book is an appetiser for the love-sick and even the stone-hearted.