Steve Obidi: Poetry Lines In Search Of The Truth (Book Review)

 Book: Eternal Truth (Poems: Timeless Wisdom for Purposeful Living)

Author: Steve Obidi

Pagination: 122

Publishers: Kraft Books Limited, Ibadan, Nigeria

Reviewer: Banji Ojewale

Russian-American poet and essayist, Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987, going on to become, in 1991, the United States Poet Laureate, which classed him ‘’among the most influential Christian poets of the 20^th Century.’’

In his quest to reverse what he perceived a decline in the spoken and written language in the US society, Brodsky proposed that ‘’books of American poetry be placed next to Gideon Bibles in motel rooms.’’ His argument? ‘’Poetry is perhaps the only insurance we’ve got against the vulgarity of the human heart.’’ The authorities agreed with Brodsky; by the time he died before the close of the century, many books had already been distributed to hotels and hospitals across the US.

However down to our age in the 21^st Century, Steve Obidi, a Nigerian intellectual and dexterous mass communicator, has a weightier task for poetry: he is dispatching the genre to look for the Eternal Truth and hand it over to his compatriots and all those who worldwide love the power wielded by the truth.

And not being an armchair pursuer of this virtue, Obidi, a pastor, member of the Editorial Board of the Deeper Christian Life Ministry, DCLM, with a PhD in tow, has figuratively pillaged ‘’over half a library to make one book’’ in the hunt for the Eternal Truth.

His work has allusions, even if sometimes veiled, to Biblical personalities and their deeds, to denizens of Greek mythology, to  Nigerian and global politics and themes, to concerns about the planet and its cyclical plagues and conflicts, to human suffering, to death and its attendant grief, and to mundane realities we grapple with seasonally. Poet Obidi believes there’re deep and inviolate realities in all these that coarse prose can’t sufficiently frame for serious contemplative attention and resolution.

He isn’t aware of many truths but one, which he exalts as “Most Excellent Eternal Truth’’. He and truth met one ‘’scenic morn’’. The writer wasn’t the same after that encounter.

In the opening eponymous composition, he recalls: You beckoned and graciously hugged me. /Disarmed, convicted, I submitted/ Thenceforth to be your devotee…I signed up to defend the Truth…

The poems in Eternal Truth are then scripted… with a bleeding pen /From a heart that is wracked with pain ... We must tell the truth, even at gunpoint /For intrinsic in truth is something that sets free/ If only we could swallow our pride and with truth agree. (The tipping point ). 

You don’t expect this verse exponent to do a halfway work; he would honour the truth, regardless of the controversy it engenders as he does in The mad lady, where two worlds appear to be players on the same field, yet inattentive to what’s on the ground. The writer arbitrates: She scorns at the ignorance of /sympathetic bystanders…she’s misjudged /Who can convince her that / something has gone wrong?

A bouquet of queries is an expansive look at the inexplicably grave want plaguing mankind in the midst of plenty. The poet can see wise men and women all over the place; but their wisdom can’t save, can’t bring prosperity, can’t make us, once again, walk tall. It reminds us of lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: Water, water, everywhere, /And all the boards did shrink;/ Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink. With Obidi the paradox elicits a rhetoric poser, Why do we ask, ‘’Where do we go from here?’’ /when nobody said he’s going anywhere?

Such is his urgent mission to let the whole world adore the truth and get liberated that in We’re the king’s brothers, Obidi’s lines don’t receive a punctuation until the author arrives at the 11^th junction. It’s breathless run, disavowing a pause.

There are occasions to lament the havoc we bring on ourselves for contemning the truth: Lost opportunities, Denial, It’s all over, The zeitgeist, The famished earth, Man and time, and Tears which is only 14 lines but conjures a journey and conversations of many centuries.

Steve Obidi’s Eternal Truth has room for the scourge of the planet called Covid-19. One of the poems is A world on pause. Although it closes pointing us all to the need to look up, the deeper charge is to brace for a finality, an endless pause unlike the brevity of standstill Covid brought. The poet’s truth is simply saying a new dispensation is on the way, where the world won’t be on suspension by plagues or manmade contraptions, but by what’s outside its system.

Some entries in the section the poet calls Aspirations and Assuagements have a harvest of creative rendition: My beloved, Moonlight Concourse and Dream fulfilled. Here Obidi appears to draw hugely from Christopher Okigbo, the late classical writer considered the greatest poet Nigeria has produced. His long lines contrast the short ones to present the picture of an asymmetric world. 

Which is why Obidi assembles verses of dirges that mourn loved ones and closes with The Sacred and Symphonic which itself hangs on questions whose answers are clothed in the Eternal Truth his book is propagating. Fundamental insights about life are to be possessed by arming ourselves with the truth. And what is the truth?

In poet Obidi’s cosmos, it’s to have unbudging vitality of character in an environment of loose living and defend your stand sacrificially, believing you can’t wilt under the God of Truth. Like the American Nobel Laureate, Obidi holds that colloquial language can’t wing this burden; only sublime poetry can.

Steve Obidi’s poetic prowess may be too early to appraise from a single debut. But, that itself isn’t proper for a historically primed critic to say. Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe and our own Okigbo were authors who wrote only one book, but marched on to greatness later.

So, where do we place poet Obidi? What is he foreshadowing? He combines the powers of arresting poetry and pulsating prose brewed in the cauldron of poetry. In other words, he is at home in both worlds. But such literary nimbleness can pose challenges, as it does in I’m just me. It should have been left in the traditional heroic couplet form, rather than the four-line stanza arrangement.

Finally, what’s Steve Obidi’s poetry adumbrating? I think it will lead us to crave for the elevated diction we require to match the campaign or crusade for character transformation in society.

*Banji Ojewale is a writer in Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria.