Aroma of a Burning Bush: a Collection of Poems

Author: Samuel Osaze

Reviewer: Reginald, Chiedu  Ofodile

Publisher:

No of pages: 104

Aroma of a Burning Bush roused, then doused, a certain suspicion of mine.  It is my distrust of free verse!  I bow to the masters: in the last two centuries, such luminaries as Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Langston Hughes profusely produced free verse, which of course are global classics.

However, that form, or ‘formlessness,’ has grievously degraded poetry.  A certain obnoxious notion has obviously taken root.  It is that, if words were set out in short lines, however uninspired, or bland or clumsy, the presentation merited the designation ‘poetry’ and all objectors deserved denunciation as stultifying arch-traditionalists.  The global spawn of this concept is work that is sometimes baser than doggerel, instantly assimilable, pedestrian, posing no intellectual challenges.

Samuel Osaze in Aroma of a Burning Bush establishes that free verse can be superb poetry.  Insightful, a veritable wordsmith, he proves that free verse need not be facile or flimsy.  He invests the form with profundity and lush lyricalness.

The topics in the collection are many and varied.  The work embraces the public and the private, the romantic and the elegiac, gratitude to benign mentors and clash of elements, verses ‘Soyinkaian’ and some ‘Okigbotic.’ The poem Say Yes I do recalled the secondary school love-letter of a generation ago, and also Shakespeare’s 18^th Sonnet,  Shall I compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?…  The eulogies in Osaze’s collection prompt the reflection that poets are famously introspective, retrospective, melancholic, preoccupied with bereavement.  The sneer of John Donne’s 17^th century classic, Death Be Not Proud, is echoed in Dylan Thomas’s 20^th century declaration, And Death Shall Have no Dominion.  Alfred Lord Tennyson’s renowned In Memoriam, his eulogy of his idolised friend Hallam is like a widow’s grieving for her husband.  Isn’t Thomas Gray immortalised by his morbid musing on death, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard?

Felicitous phrases and delightful alliterations abound in Aroma of a Burnish Bush.  From the beginning of the collection comes:

A lonely leaf protests in vain

awaiting fume of full flame

awe of helpless veils the arsonists’ face

for the mild fire is gone wild.

In Fire and Water comes, ‘Your fiend, your friend,’ and in Dear Retribution ‘As Python pounces on its prey.’  Take me to my Destiny asserts the importance of the spirit, its potential to remain unshaken by crushing obstacles.  It echoes the classic Victorian paean to valour, William Erenest Henley’s Invictus.

Out of the Night that covers me

Black as the pit from pole to pole

I thank whatever gods may be 

For my unconquerable soul…

It matters not how strait the gate

How charged with punishments the scroll

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.

This is echoed in a 20^th century disavowal of timidity, Maya Angelou’s

Life Doesn’t Frighten me.

Shadows on the wall

Noises down the hall

Life doesn’t frighten me at all…

Maya Angelou, that world-acclaimed phenomenon, in her autobiography

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, made an assertion that is apposite to Osaze’s collection: ‘We live in direct relation to the dedication of our poets.’  Poetry can efface fear, restore wrecked and wretched souls, illumine, direct, inspire, inspirit.  Mahatma Ghandi, ploughing his excruciating furrow, was sustained by certain words of India’s great poet, Rabindranath Tagore’s:  ‘If they answer not to thy call, walk alone.’  The accomplished Nigerian writer, Elechi Amadi, despairing in detention during the Nigerian civil war, was upheld by James Elroy Flecker’s verse ‘…But surely we are brave, Who make the Golden Journey to Sarmarkand.’

Some supposed that poetry is invariably civil, beguiling, and unobtrusive.  Aroma of a Burning Bush, whilst manifesting considerable charm, features other elements.  The collection is audacious and combative, neither quailing at unpleasantness nor shrinking from the unpalatable.   The poet’s forthrightness embraces even the anal:

‘The one whose anus

Sits upon my head, warmly afflicting my

Soul with early baldness.’

I like to think that Samuel Osaze’s work is organic.  I hope he continually explores and experiments with form and other poetic elements in the lifelong studentship of the serious artist.  His poetic debut, Aroma of a Burning Bush, will scandalise and tranquillise, entertain and educate, baffle and tickle. None is likely to fault it as bland or hollow.