*Borrowed from Brooklyn Public Library Storage*

This was a really interesting collection of poems. I'm not sure I truly understood most of them, as they're very wrapped up in the cosmology and rituals of the Ewe people. I just don't know anything about that, and often felt like there was a wall I couldn't climb to really dig into the poems. I could appreciate the way Awoonor's is memorializing, grieving for that culture. These poems are very elegiac, even psalm-like. It made me think about myth-making and how true this dream of a re-imagined Ewe culture really was. 

The vast majority of the poems are highly oratorical and ritualistic. Beseeching a god, ancestor, or "true" Ewe cultural inheritors to forgive the people for forgetting their roots. He pays a lot of attention to the materials of the culture, and I did enjoy how musically the sounds of the word were put together at times. I think it was part of how the poems were imagined as spoken/sung cultural artifacts. The writing was really good and I learned a fair bit about recent Ghanaian history from the introduction and many of the poems. But since they were all drawing on such foreign metaphors and traditions, I felt like I could only really appreciate the mood; the content was inaccessible to me. Reminded me of trying to play saxophone (I'm a flutist).

There were a few that I really liked. "I heard a Bird Cry" still operates in that elegiac mode, but it's much longer than the other poems, and Awoonor creates a fairly dense symbolic net through the poem where images keep cropping up and drawing you back to previous stanzas. His character is also different in this poem. It felt like a homeless prophet raving to a crowd of bypassers. The frantic, frenetic energy of it was a welcome break from the grief even while many of the images were similar.

The other that I connected to was "Hymn to My Dumb Earth." Here we see Awoonor as a global citizen, not just as scion of a lost culture he wants to reclaim. It's really the only poem in the book written intentionally from this perspective, and the style was remarkably different. Really modern, and drawing on lots of cultural symbols that I could actually use! Jazz, Christianity, Marxism, western geography, western literary references, etc. Interestingly, this poem was also seeded with references to many of the other poems in the collection. Knowing that Awoonor can also write like this makes me wish that I could truly understand the other poems. It was humbling to be so thoroughly confronted by the limits of my own perspective.

There were really only 2 poems that I felt I really connected with in this collection, and that's why I'm rating it a 3 and not higher. For a more educated reader, I'm sure this collection could be a more rewarding experience.