Poetry Review: Ayomide ‘D’Great’ Inufin’s Kogi, I come To You is stunning but sloppy
West African poetry has a tradition of addressing a place as if it were a person or human, of turning geography into genealogy, and a landscape into a lineage. Strictly following the tradition, the poet Ayomide Inufin D’Great established his poem, “Kogi, I Come To You!”, within the purview of the personification of a place. […]
West African poetry has a tradition of addressing a place as if it were a person or human, of turning geography into genealogy, and a landscape into a lineage. Strictly following the tradition, the poet Ayomide Inufin D’Great established his poem, “Kogi, I Come To You!”, within the purview of the personification of a place. It makes a reasonable claim for the stretches of its five stanzas.
The poem serves as an act of homecoming, a blood claim, a supplication, and, at moments, an ultimatum. It has earnest feelings and at least three images that justify close attention. It also has structural inconsistencies, language that buckles or strays under the poet’s overblown ambition, and a tonal instability that deters it from fully becoming what it obviously wants to be.
The poem begins in the style of Oriki, the Yoruba praise tradition, in which the subject is exalted through its attributes, epithets, and accumulated honours, rather than through argumentative reasoning. “With open arms and art, / a mother welcomes her child, / she flatters the ground, / Splash honours at her aisles, / belauds her cloud, whirls her wind, / whisk her wide water.” D’Great sustains the ceremonial and accumulative movement of these stanzas with some confidence but the fiction already shows an early strain.
“Belaud,” meaning to praise lavishly, is an unusual verb, and applied to clouds, attributes the act of praise to meteorological events, which is either a bold anthropomorphism or a grammatical drift the poem isn’t prepared for. “Aisles,” similarly, introduces an architectural vocabulary, say, church aisles or theatre aisles, into a geographical poem without establishing the ecclesiastical metaphor that would make the borrowing worthwhile. These misuses of words show that the poem’s language is extending beyond what its structure can hold, projecting meanings rather than letting the reader interpret them.
The first stanza is saved from settling into sheer embellishment with a single tonal rupture: “Only a bastard hears / father’s eulogies and turns a deaf [ear]”. The word “bastard” strikes differently from everything around it. The sharpened diction tightened the poem’s effect, suddenly making its emotional subtext visible. And it becomes glaring that the speaker isn’t merely paying homage to Kogi but defending a right to return, asserting a bloodline claim against some implied challenges to their belonging. That subtext gives the whole opening segment retroactive tension: The warmth of the motherland was never uncomplicated but always plagued by the possibility of dispossession.
The second stanza consolidates the petition, but the poem begins to overreach. “Exalt you like God” without the theological backing that would make the comparison connect as anything but hyperbole. Comparing the act of praising Kogi to exalting God is a serious claim. It requires an earlier establishment of the sacred register preparing the reader for that feeling of altitude for it to hold. But the poem has not done that yet, so the simile gestures at transcendence without earning it. In the same vein, “the omega of my love” is ambitious in its symbolism. Omega, as in Biblical reference for the ultimate God, the irreducible beginning and the end. But it serves as a mere embellishment for the stanzas rather than a culmination that the reader has been brought to through accumulated pressure.
The third stanza of the poem is the most compressed and, for that reason, its most successful. “Grant me the fertility of this land! / Works of wonder that sanctify the hands, / The grace that mercy favours, / Abundance that causes chaos.” A stanza that short needs to be devastatingly accurate to prove its brevity, and it very nearly does that: At four lines, it functions structurally almost as an interruption to the earlier stanzas.
“Abundance that causes chaos” is the poem’s finest image. It captures something about surplus and its discontents, how it brews greed and destruction, painting a picture of how blessing can overwhelm the structure meant to contain it. And it carries, for any reader, who is aware of Kogi’s insecurity and economic reality. It’s timely and striking. As the poem’s most earned specificity, it shows what Inufin is capable of if he curtails his feelings into precision.
“Listen to me!” opens the fourth stanza as a bold proclamation. It shifts the poem from a prayer to a claim. That register move is dramatically important, because the poem has been prostrating itself before Kogi but here the speaker stands upright to demand what he believes is rightly his. The line is the poem’s most theatrically compelling point of transition.
What follows, however, deviates from the point. “A mother does not hear her / child’s cry and stays at peace” is emotionally correct but imagistically bland. The poem retreats quickly back into supplication without exploring the full dramatic consequence of the speaker’s claim. “Crown my clarion call and make me bliss” then blends the problem with a syntactic breakdown: “make me bliss” is neither standard English nor a convincing grammatical subversion. It reads as an editing oversight, a line that needed one more pass. “Longings of longsuffering” is alliterative but semantically circular (longing and long-suffering are almost synonyms in this context). And the pairing folds back on itself rather than creating the productive tension required by such strong compression. The stanza begins forcefully and then softens. That’s a structural problem as much as a stylistic one.
The poem lacks specificity in its imagery. Kogi is invoked through land, water, clouds, and wind but none of the images is particular to Kogi. Remove the title and the landscape would fit any West African geography. This is a significant problem for such a poem whose entire premise is the irreplaceable specificity of this place and this blood. “Abundance that causes chaos” succeeds because it breaks this pattern. The rest of the poem adores Kogi in abstract but leaves Kogi’s concrete reality unimagined.
The poem ends with composure in the fifth stanza, after wobbling from the first stanza to the fourth. “Naked as nature I come / to exhale my grief and absorb / the royalties in the belly of your kingdom” returns the speaker to surrender, having through tribute, petition, defiance, and demand. “The belly of your kingdom” is an especially evocative spatial image and interior, inherited and generative, it gives the poem a closing dignity that its middle section does not keep.
Kogi’s reality, like that of many states in Nigeria, is so miserable that it corrodes the images of motherland and homecoming for her indigenes. With the woeful conditions of the state, and how Inufin confusingly expresses himself, the poem is not yet what it wants to be. But what it wants to be is worth the effort of becoming.