THE POET AS A SOMNABULIST.. A review of Sesan Ajayi's A BURST OF FIREFLIES

This article was published in DAILY TIMES April 12,1992 and DAILY SKETCH April 16, 1992

Title: A Burst of Fireflies
Author: Sesan Ajayi
Publishers: Kraft Books Limited, Ibadan
Reviewer: Dele Bankole

At a moment like this when pretenders and literary quacks parade themselves as poets, a work like Sesan Ajayi's A BURST OF FIREFLIES seems to have marked the beginning of the end to these traumatic pretences. In a very rare coalition of intellectualism and gripping colourlines of symbols, images, sound and style, the poet has reproduced the exact temparament of today's world through the consciousness of an untiring somnabulist (poet/persona).

The collection which is crefully arranged under three sections - ''muffled -beats, ''distant beats' and "up-beats" is a device to show the metamorphic facets of human temparaments of sobriety, loneliness and uncertainty, of pleas and supplication, and of hope, wishes and unsung celebrations. In the "Introit" to the collection, there is creative ablution in the surges of fire of ritual: i calcify nagging utterances/shared rings of morphemes/I echo the sprinting rivulets/fast flowing streams of fire. The poet/persona here invites us to partake in the ritual of fire.

What strikes one while reading this collection is the use of poetic chronology. A new poem is always an offshoot of the former. The ritual in "Introit" is cleansing. In "A Penitent Song", there are tears that ignite votive urges to spiritual eloquences pleading for a shower of forgiveness. The subsequent emulgence of guilt and sin had empeopled the collection; the poet-persona then becoming the hardy social commentator and chronicler softening daunted souls with emollient streaks of "Atoning word(s). Poems like "God's Children", "No tears today", "Anti sap-song I and II, "A burden of ties" etc are a registration of this poetic concern. The confessional tone in most of the poems could be deliberate for an outward thrust of the message which are heavily laden with extemporary symbols and metaphors often intrusively individualistic.

Earnestly, the poet appears to be a hortative symbolist more in the tradition of Christopher Okigbo. The power of the poems rests solely on the horst of symbols, metaphors and images delicately employed as an index of testy realities. Cutting across the entire collection is a persistent reference to "dream" and "chloroform"(a dream remembered", "a love song I and II","no tears today", "the promise of age", " grief shared") which is to create a picture of loneliness, nothingness and inactivity.

Though we see that the gazes of the "somnabulist" (the persona) are oneiric, there is a pull of a symbolic orgy where an escape from inactivity and loneliness can be effected. " A dream remembered" typifies a fervous display of symbolic gestures of those gazes of a somnabulist; "dark clergies'', "syllables of death''"yellowing pages'', "drowsy hibiscus", "liquid moment". "muscled amens'', "Aluminium dream''. This overload of symbols, metaphors and images, apart from concretising in sombre tone the persona worries and restleness, it also depicts an engagement in poetic psychosis punctuated in wierd and dissociated symbolism and imagery.

If influence is anything important in literature, Sesan Ajayi seems to have licked a bit of that invocative poetry of Niyi Osundare and Afam Akeh. "Ofirima" "Isiokpo" and "a night out in Choba" show the poet's romance with nature, in this sense, physical and metaphysical landscape. To be candid however,Mr Ajayi has not presented himself as a poet of nature, for his poems (even those three) lack the intense invocative , mesmerizing and magical prowess noted in the supposed sources of his influence.

A BURST OF FIREFLIES is a hymnal tract with a boundless power of lyricism. This singular effect has re-affirmed that poetry , apart from the stylistic and the contextual appeal, is essentially an outlet for musical craft.The syncopation, in "a verbal collage" and ''a marriage song'' makes one to tarry awhile before deciding if indeed one has before him a poetry collection or a canticle of a selected songs.

It should be noted here that through the exploration of the "shuttered self"("anonymity") poetry could be an externalisation of those moulding dreams which are nevertheless the exact picture of the world out there. The poems ithe collection are not particularly independent of that moralist voice of the poet. It can be added here that A BURST OF FIREFLIES is a re-write of a moribound order of poetry; it is a rebirth of imaginative texture in poetry so they can stand the test of time.