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Niyi Osundare. City Without People: The Katrina Poems (Boston MA: Black Widow Press, 2011), 137pp., $ 19.95, ISBN: 978-0-9837079-1-2.The universe of meanings that Osundare presents in City Without People begins to expand from the book’s cover designed by Kerrie Kemperman. From here the reader is ushered into those simplex–complex manoeuverings that have come to delineate Osundare’s ‘songs of the marketplace’. With the word ‘City’ floating forlornly in the upper part of the cover, ‘Without’ (right in the middle of) the dark, soft, sober New Orleans and the ‘People’ appearing below—seemingly submerged in the yawning mouth of the hungry waters—there is an overall image of destructive downpour that is invoked in the broken calligraphy of these key title-words. The reader is struck by these graphic meanings before anything else.Divided into five sections, the volume progresses sequentially as a poetic narrative of the different phases of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in which the poet (a visiting professor at the University of New Orleans) and his wife almost lost their lives. Titled “Water, Water! …,” the first section boldly indicates the book’s thematic filiations with Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Importantly, this section chronicles how the hurricane disaster started but also
Matatu – Brill
Published: Jan 1, 2016
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