Labyrinths with Path of Thunder
Nigeria's greatest poet, killed at 35 fighting in the Biafran War, left a body of work of extraordinary density and beauty. The poems are simultaneously modernist, rooted in Igbo mythology, and prophetically political. "Path of Thunder" was written just before his death as a kind of premonition. Chinua Achebe called him the finest African poet of his generation. The Labyrinths sequence draws on ritual, Western classical literature, and African oral tradition in equal measure.
'Sisters of Silence,' from the Silences sequence, is the poem readers name as the wall they can't get past: one flatly says “I couldn't make sense of 'Sisters of Silence',” and rereading didn't help. Even a sympathetic critic concedes that “Okigbo overreaches in his ambitions (or simply misses the mark)” in places, and admits the verse “might sometimes be accused of flaunting its erudition.” Several readers needed outside scaffolding, a biography open alongside the poems, just to track the Igbo, Christian, and classical references stacked on top of each other, and more than one reader here was working through the book for a postcolonial seminar rather than for pleasure. Because the poems build through rhythm and repetition instead of a followable throughline, a critic notes plainly that “the poetry is hard to quote successfully,” which leaves even admirers unable to point to the line that convinced them.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
