When Four Are Gathered: The Crucial Poets of Nigerian Modernity

Chike Okoye (Ed.)

When Four Are Gathered: The Crucial Poets of Nigerian Modernity. With a Foreword by Professor Obi Maduakor

ISBN 978-3-98940-057-3, 166 S., kt., € 27,50 (2025)

(Anglistik - Amerikanistik - Anglophonie, Bd. 31)

The watershed of Nigeria’s modernity took a very poignant turn after the civil war of 1967-1970. New temperaments, tensions, consciousnesses, strains, severances, bonds, perceptions, animosities, forbearances, loves, alliances, lessons, and so on, across the multiethnic divides of the country, materialized. These ever-dynamic states of flux have continued in different degrees and directions to date. Literature, ever-faithful, continues to accompany Nigeria’s vicissitudes – poets being arguably the most poignant in response(s) and representations. The literary traditions and the attendant canon of the Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J.P. Clark-Bekederemo, Christopher Okigbo, Gabriel Okara, and so on era gradually gave way to the Niyi Osundare, Tanure Ojaide, Chimalum Nwankwo, and Odia Ofeimun period. The whole point of this book and its intellectual exercise is to review the subsisting literary canon of an era in Nigeria’s literary historicity – that of the crucial period of upheavals in society, polity, and governance – expanding the erstwhile trio of poets to justifiably include Chimalum Nwankwo. They are the four gathered, representative as crucial poets of Nigerian modernity in this critical volume.

“Chike Okoye’s audacious attempt to locate Chimalum Nwankwo among the trio of Osundare, Ojaide and Ofeimun in his powerful “quartet of poets” is fully justified in this ground-breaking work. The book’s rigorous case-making both for Nwankwo’s inclusion in this pantheon and for more critical attention to his profound but grossly understudied oeuvre is foregrounded not only by his contributions to modern Nigerian poetry, but also by the large body of current literature and theoretically nuanced and cohesive evidence it mobilizes. To be sure, Okoye’s When Four Are Gathered has calibrated a new critical pathway that has been missing in modern African poetry criticism.”

— Dr Abba A. Abba, Fellow – British Academy, AHP, DAAD; Winner of the NLNG (2019) and ANA (2019 & 2022) Prizes for Literary Criticism; Senior Lecturer, Federal University Lokoja, Nigeria

“These essays by some of the most vibrant minds in Nigerian literary scholarship come as a critical intervention that provides historical and theoretical accounts of the role poetry has played in shaping the fate of a democratic Nigeria.”

— Sule Emmanuel Egya, Professor of African Literature and Environmental Humanities, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai, Nigeria.

Buchvorschau / Inhaltsverzeichnis (pdf)