THE POET OF DUST

The void of an ideological premise within the current generation appears to have been filled up by the recently published, ambitious work of Umar Abubakar Sidi’s The Poet of Dust.

The collection is a grand statement of the arrival of a sage with a refined consciousness that both instructs and prescribes a sense of direction and purpose for the generation. Sidi’s work is a grand theorization of poetry, representative of the ideological motive of the emerging generation both in its experimentation with style, form, and language.

A trend E.E. Sule describes as the “exogenous aesthetics” because of the generation’s obsession with and romance of foreign aesthetics and metaphors. It is a collection reminiscent of the “Euro-modernist” tradition. Published in 2019 by KONYASHAMSRUMI, the collection can best be described as a contemporary poetry dictionary. It is assured, confident, and invocative of a philosopher’s imagination. Like Osundare’s Poetry is, the Poet of Dust is a poetry manifesto of a generation lurked between post-modernism and tradition.”