Title:                                       The Book of Pain
Author:                                  Ogundare Tope
Genre:                                      Poetry
Publisher:                               Sevhage Publishers
Year of Publication:              2018
No. of Pages:                          59
Reviewer:                               Eugene Yakubu

The title The Book of Pain augurs a deceptive feeling of pessimism and hopelessness which prepares readers to delve into the collection with, but it however has themes which totally contrasts what the title denotes. It is important to note that Tope’s ingenuity with words gives him a certain level of curtness of imagination and precision of details whereby he is able to capture his ideas in the littlest words and space. Suffice to say most or virtually all the poems are written in abrupt stanzas and short and pithy lines. For the poet, happiness eludes humanity and life is a network of hurt and pain and disillusionment. He infuses mental images of vain hopes and aborted dreams by triggering the emotion of elusiveness of life. In his poem Echoes of Death, he aptly captures the vanity of life as “…painful expectations/ built,/ Houses decked with fantasies’/ crashing castles erected on beach sand/ At high tide”. This captures the fleetingness of hope and the intangibility of dreams. Tope’s metaphors are concise. He uses words which carry the weight of his ideas and imagination. Worthy of mention also is the poet’s use of allusion to classical and psychological histories. It is evident that the collection is grounded with strong influences from Freudian psychoanalysis for the poet here and there makes references to Freud’s theory of the tripartite psyche and psychoanalysis. In the poem Writing Home, the poet uses allusion to Greek mythology by introducing history about Trojan wars and also the myth of Hector and Helen. The poet dares the reader to go out looking for these allusions in history and myths which gives the reader a better understanding of the theme of the poem. In the same poem he introduces us to the “magic” of Biblical Moses. In another poem to John Mayer, Jason Mraz etc, all curious names which motivate the reader to go looking out for in history in order to fully appraise the poems.

Tope’s poems are heavy with meaning. The words, the images and the ideas are surreal and we can’t fully fathom what they connote but we can however comprehend the images he’s trying to weave, hence his thoughts. The poet, like traditional poets avoid clarity like a dream. Even though we can read his poem without much strain, we can barely nip his points accurately in the bud, keeping us in that spectral point of elusiveness, of knowing within mystery and decrypting subtle poetical codes and literariness. His ideas are phantasmic and will effortlessly enthrall readers in his superficial world, however, the point they tender seems ungraspable and dreamlike.

There are beautiful love poems which however hint at the theme of loss. This theme seems to be a recurring idea in most of the poems and the poet uses sickness, heartbreaks, hopelessness, death and bleakness to capture it. The curt and concise poem Wet Wood might look like a love poem at the surface level, but when scratched deeper it would reveal lurking themes of loss. The poet is skillful in enthralling readers and he does so in most of the poems whereby he flashes an obvious idea in readers’ minds and maintains it only to make a dramatic change of the subject matter at the end of the poem. The poems always give the impression of someone at war with his soul and struggling to find meaning in a baseless universe. Poems like Island, Flare and Writing Home all brings the theme of loss and identity to bare. Thus, readers will need to go deeper into the poet’s unconscious and subconscious in order to unearth all the words he could have said but bury them in the ambiguity of poetry.

This is a grand effort I must confess, even though the poet’s excessive use of medical jargons and verbose words waters down the rhythm of the poems. Instead of dedicating his time to literary and poetic images, the poet spends time introducing medical terminologies that would have turned off readers before they even go deeper into the collection. If this collection had given readers a little break from words like “rigor mortis”, “Clogging friable alveoli”, “Pyrexia driven seizures”, “Fibrosis of the Corpora Cavernosa” and generally words that send the reader looking for a dictionary before he finishes a line in the poem, it would have delivered successfully in its style and theme. The poems have fair background in the dictates of psychology. This gives the collection credence and the poet credibility as a writer who even in the midst of his turgid vocabularies captures relevant themes that have been the subject of debates in art and the society. The collection might not portray social realism and topical issues in the society, it however captures issues of identity as it affect the individual as a microcosm of the society. Any reader would relate to this collection for its clear diction and unique universal themes. Hence, there is a poem for everyone that is eager to relive his life in the pages of The Book of Pain.