Grief is the driving force of this book, and the poet permits us to witness its currents in various states of mind, states of origin (such as Kaduna, Borno, and Lagos) and different bodies. Grief is tied to memory—the origin of lamentation. Imossan executes this theme brilliantly in a way that perforates a deep hole in the hearts, waiting for a certain kind of happiness to feel this void. For the Love of Country and Memory is quite a success of art. However, its voice is familiarly dark like many poems of Nigerian poets today. The bulk of the collection is hitched to the persistent tropes of ‘body’, ‘grief’, ‘moon’, ‘mother/father’, ‘boy’, and suchlike as often encountered in contemporary Nigeria poetry. A quick study of some of the last issues of Lolwe Magazine, featuring poems by Nigerian writers, is filled with the surfeit of these words. Some of the lines in ‘Retroflex & Other Poems’ by Saheed Sunday published in the magazine read: ‘say my body is a repetition of an endless loop // — an embedded clause unworn by the syntax of my body’s arms’. In Abdukareem Abdukareem’s, ‘Learning the Anatomy of Sound, Silence, & Noise’, the speaker laments: ‘On some days, a cacophony of babel upholds in the ruffled dawn // of my tongue & I become a boy heading into ruin’. These same tropes reverberate through the book in lines such as: 

a boy is learning for the first time that  

a song is just a poem that has passed through water. 

             —in the poem, ‘As Random as Death is’.  

there was a boy drowning inside of me.  

i wanted to pull him out as rose-petal but the  

voice on the radio said, a bounty has been placed on  

any boy who sees flowers in the body of another boy. 

             —from the poem, ‘A River Burning’. 

This artistic flaw in Nigerian poetry is what the critic and essayist, Carl Tever, vehemently discusses and flagellates in his essay, O’Greifa. ‘My position of then still stands: We expect that poets, as they claim to be, are able to invent new modes of pressing the fine wine out of language,’ Tever says, ‘not dressing up similar imageries that run through the works of so many of their contemporaries, under the guise of style, when writing their poems.’ Despite the shortcomings of this oeuvre, it is promising and serves as a forerunner of more intentional and timely books to expect from Imossan⎈