This is awesome news for Niyi Osundare’s fans: he has a new book out in January 2022. Yaaaaay! Titled Green: Sighs of our Ailing Planet, the collection is an urgent collection of necessity born out of the poet’s need to speak to issues that plague the world. The overview of the book on Barnes and Noble notes that it “is a critical pastoral of poems concerning the environment aroudn the world, from place to place…a book relevant and hopeful for people to stop and reflect on the endangered beauty of all of nature.”
Concerns for nature and green advocacy are not alien to Osundare’s writings, as evidenced in one of his more popular poems ‘Ours to plough, not to plunder.’ Matter of fact, his Eye of the Earth focuses on this theme. However, there seems to be some urgency to this new writing in the midst of the growing issues around the planet on almost every sphere. Concerning this, Osundare avers that:
Of all my 20-something books of poetry, none has confronted me with a more challenging combination of urgency of content and complexity of execution than this new one. I daresay the existential imperative of its content has been responsible for the pain that came with its composition and the uneasy relief I now feel upon its completion. There is something deeply spiritual, almost religious, about the mission and the message of the poems, and the many ways they have turned out to be denizens of that vital interface between the ecological and the cosmic…
This seems like a book worth getting. You can preorder the book at Barnes and Noble to get the book as soon as it is available on January 1, 2022 or wait to get it in some store or the other close to you.
And while you are at it, let’s be kind to our earth in every way we can while being loving to those around us. Cheers!
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