Phial of Passing Memories, A

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Phial of Passing Memories, A

By (author): James Yeku

James Yékú’s second collection lingers on a poetics of elsewhere, as seen through poems that evoke various memories. In A Phial of Passing Memories, the poems offer shifting sceneries that record the everyday and chronicle vagrant seasons. This collection presents the vivid imagination of a keen mind documenting the passing rhythms of the abiding and the mundane, unfurling in a dance of elegance and lyrical beauty. The poems meander but remain anchored in particular geographies, from where they engage the varied cadences of the human condition. They blend the strange and the familiar into a meditation on the power of unforgetting, the enjambments and stoppages of journeys, and the nature of things themselves.

AUTHOR

James Yeku

James Yékú is a Nigerian-Canadian writer who lived in Saskatoon for six years before moving to Lawrence, Kansas, where he is an Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and leads the African Digital Humanities at the University of Kansas. Yékú is the author of Cultural Netizenship.

Reviews

Whether portraying the smell of rain on dry earth or the tops of hills in the fall we are in the presence of a poet able to see reality with a childs clarity and present it with a scholars diction The majority of Yks poems however are about arrivals and departuresincluding births and deathsthe self in exile and lifes elusive meaning Occasionally celebratory but mostly elegiac these poems are deeply existential in ways that make this reviewer think of Camus Myth of Sisyphus H Nigel Thomas author ofThe Voyage

InA Phial of Passing MemoriesJames Yk captures the significant moments of life with arresting images that shed light on the human experience bringing a measure of balance and confidence to his engagement with travels nature and memorymaking Highly descriptive this collection entertains takes the reader on several journeys and leads one to deep thought It is a worthy addition to the new African diasporic literature Tanure Ojaide Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies The University of North Carolina at Charlotte