Niyi Osundare's latest book of poems, Green: Sighs Of Our Ailing Planet,
is a critical pastoral of poems concerning the environment around the
world--A poet of renown who has travelled and given performances in many
parts of the world, he has felt and tried to put into words what he has
felt in what he has seen-from the Amazon to the deserts of North Africa
to his home country of Nigeria. For him it was the nature speaking to
him and through him, pleading and imploring...but still beautiful?
Lushness of destruction, transmuted from a nature endangered....an
accessible plea from nature through Osundare's words. A book relevant
and hopeful for people to stop and reflect on the endangered beauty of
all of nature. In the words of Niyi Osundare: Of all my 20-something
books of poetry, none has confronted me with a more challenging
combination of urgency of content and complexity of execution than this
new one. I daresay the existential imperative of its content has been
responsible for the pain that came with its composition and the uneasy
relief I now feel upon its completion. There is something deeply
spiritual, almost religious, about the mission and the message of the
poems, and the many ways they have turned out to be denizens of that
vital interface between the ecological and the cosmic...
