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Title:
Love Apart.
Author:
Hyginus Ekwuazi (Dr.)
Publisher:
Kraft Books Limited, Ibadan.
Pages:
84
Love Apart…
Hyginus Ekwuazi (Dr.), the author, teaches Media Arts (Broadcasting & Film) at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. Though he has earned several film credits, published three stage plays and a novelette adapted from a feature film which he scripted. Love Apart is his first poetry work.
Love Apart has shown its several sides to life by coming out of the refinery of words cleanly and neatly woven as a fabric not only for covering, but also for the beauty of a sane society. I will agree with Harry Garuba that Love Apart offers a gripping insight into human experiences by probing into the heart and the human conditions, particularly in the context of economic realities.
The book passes across, from its prefacing dedication, the true way through which love should be practiced in a marital setting, as against the bastardization and corruption that the expression of love has suffered. ‘…a rib shall I take and a mate thou shalt have thereof...” This raises a question on whether or not polygamy is a divine or a devilish transaction, and unfaithfulness in love-relationship a play or ploy or just an extension of the author’s inclination to the Christian faith. The author also delved into the general human feeling of loneliness. It should be considered here that loneliness is not only a state of bodily solitude but on the contrary, a feeling that may strike even when one is in the midst of a multitude of people yet, finding one’s self in some emotionally distant places, journeyed through within a be-laden heart, and fallen by the way-side of one’s emotional mileage.
Then a company or a companionship is discovered to be more contained in the presence of people in one’s heart. And if someone surfers loneliness, let him search for a company, not in the streets or in the loftiness of a bedroom but in his heart for a few persons, perhaps for just one soul ( offeree) that has volunteered to be there.In the other sense, loneliness is not when a crowd is devoid of a company or a mere absence of companions but there is also a possibility of events when one may find self; a stranger in the presence of so many offerees as companions and still fell so much etranged in a pool of homeliness and warm offering, as by blood and not by waters. This thus validates Christopher Okigbo’s affirmation of life in his own Love Apart, which actually has served as the template for Ekwuazi’s replication (page 7)
The moon has ascended between us
between two pines
that bow to each other
Love with the moon has ascended
has fed on our solitary stems
And we are now shadows
that cling to each other
but kiss the air only.
Departure.
The book shows that the departing moment is always a grey moment in one’s life, it is often better when one is the departed than when one would have to bear the pain of watching the blue skies come in between one and his folk. The most painful scene of departure is not when hands are waved in hope of an eventual return or of a sure re-union, but when only in sorrow the head is nodded or thoughtfully swung side-ways with a sure eternity of separation…
My grey days that’s what I call them
the days my friends come visiting
from the vast desert of eternity
into which they’ve taken their journey (pp 32-36).
Skies are decorated-ly covered with petals of colorful reeds, and when a gaze is fixed up the stars, one may expect the stars to smile in return, but when instead, it nose-dives into the far earth beneath, then a hole is punctured in the skies through which the tears drip on the poor earth; the heart that watches the departure through a tunnel-darkly. Then, this is what happens when meteors fall is...
…like endless lines of the unemployed,
the retrenched and the dispossessed
going back to the village homes from which they had sought
a home from home ( pp44-47).
Loving a woman like you (a state)
The book goes to the mainstreaming of his poetry; into the socio-economic issues and matters of national - love questions, more so at a time that the Niger-Delta issue has become of great national concern. Then in great pity it will end, the love one had kept with such a great gesture for a state like the love of a woman, when:
The same oil that heats up the day
The same oil that heats up the night
That same oil boils anger at octane level.
pitying them
those private pockets
into which pipelines flow
who use wealth of the pipelines
to multiply poverty across the land
who build dynasties on our pipelines,
for the eggs they are incubating
have no albumen,
I pity them even more,
because they lack the love of a woman like you (pp 63-65).
END NOTES
Young writers in the University of Ibadan and the entire nation are thus encouraged by this maiden work by Hyginus Ekwuazi that there is much in things to do than in things imagined. Going through Love Apart will actually reveal that there are much more virtues in the author as a poet than as a teacher of Media Arts.
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ibk
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