by Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike
University of Alberta Press
2023/$19.99/88 pp.
I didn’t mean to read Uche Umezurike’s latest collection of poems, there’s more, all in one sitting. But it is the kind of collection that leads you in with short lyrical works, slowly layering images, slowly working ideas until you unexpectedly find yourself immersed in a complex and brooding world.
Umezurike is a Nigerian (Igbo) writer who spent several years in Edmonton and is now based in Calgary. As such, his poems often straddle multiple worlds. He has no problems linking oil spills in Nigeria with familiar spills closer to home in Alberta. In fact, one of the collection’s preoccupations is the tricky question of home. “We call home anywhere we find something to love,” he proffers in “Seagulls,” only to immediately counter that “home is no more than concrete and earth.” This unsettled relationship to home is reflected in several poems and is emphasized in states of transition that range from physical locales, such as train platforms, bus stops and cafes, to natural settings such as the shifting seasons, the variegated but temporary blossoms and the mercurial and history-laden Atlantic Ocean.
One striking element of the collection involves Umezurike’s engagement with oral forms. He has the luxury of mining a rich Igbo tradition in this regard. (Chinua Achebe, one of the greatest writers of the 20th-century, fondly referred to Igbo proverbs as “the palm oil with which words are eaten.”) Not only does he use proverbs to contemplate Nigeria as a fraught site for home, but he ingeniously reworks them to give Canada a renewed, complex reconsideration as home. “The Raven,” for example, is immersed in Igbo ceremonial tradition but depicts an exchange between the speaker of the poem, who is clearly at home in these traditions, and a raven, whose home readers will more readily identify with the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and their oral stories. The poem is an inventive battle of proverbs akin to contemporary rappers spitting rhymes at each other.
But ultimately Umezurike is at his best as a nature writer meandering through prairie landscapes. He notes seasonal changes and endless varieties of vegetation in bloom; he has revealing, though sometimes challenging, encounters on outdoor walks; he observes himself and his loved ones transformed in this new land that now they too are transforming. In “Blooms of June” his young daughter teaches him to see the beauty of a flower whose name he doesn’t know. What was for him a “minor detail/ a view as banal as a tree in bloom” becomes a ceremony of recognition: “I squeeze my daughter’s shoulder,/ awake to moments such as this.” These are the moments that kept me flipping through the collection all morning long. “There’s more,” Umezurike promises with each turn of the page. Yes, there is.
Bertrand Bickersteth is the author of The Response of Weeds.
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