It is safe to say that poetry in its entire artfulness requires a poet to assume forms for his symbolisms, much like an actor in a movie portrays a character other than his natural attributes. If a poet could as well create a contrary or unpopular roles for a phenomenon, then such poet should not be underestimated of his fluidity, and that is what Temidayo Jacob represents.
In Beauty Of Ashes, poetry is a luxurious liner of creativity navigated on the turbulence of a thunderstorm. Talk about how the venom of a snake is converted to an antidote for another form of illness. This is just a hint at the paradox that accentuates the blessings in disguise off an emerging beauty from an erstwhile destruction. Call this the beauty of destruction (of which “ashes” is a befitting symbolism).
Beauty Of Ashes is a simply fiery poem by the cover, that ends up with a flowery end for a razed nicotine (or ‘weed’) of a cigar tube. Imagine an ashtray filled with the fragrance of lavender – the beauty of ashes enough to attract perceptions (smells). Taking a leaf of each page of this collection, we are burning down a seemingly primitive idea of fire as a merely destructive force of nature that leaves no footprints of hope and beauty. We are reestablishing a thought that all that desires beauty deserves a touch of fire.
Watching It Burn takes an experimental route. This is a poet’s curiosity about God as a form ( “I lit him up into incense/ & watching him burn slowly,/ wondering if he would remain…). Would God still remain as he is exalted in the house of worship or become ashen like the burnt scripture bearing His names? This is a question only fires could ask. This poem is the fire doing its job on the questionability of godhood.
Becoming A Phoenix reveals the allure that succeeds cremation. The first and second stanzas only seemed to assume that there is “beauty” in getting burnt, and that beauty is just the smoke that ascends the sky. The first two stanzas almost stand out as a separate poetic entity. Stanza three could pass off as another poem on its own, concisely explaining what it means “becoming a phoenix”. All the same, the poem still surrounds the general theme.
Love Afire easily reminds me of an Ed Sheeran song, Afire Love, which I turned on immediately I saw the former-title while reading the poem. The poem brings metamorphosis into play (“with orgasm transforming an erection into wax,/ & wax transforming into rock…”) as an effect of the intercourse between fire and a white candle whose “clitoris” is a metaphor for its thread. Love Afire emphasizes the thirst of a candle wax for more fire till it comes across a volcano eventually melting it down into extinction (“…that turns it into ashes). Every candle desires what would kill it, because fire is the only beautiful thing that could happen to a candle wax.
Burning For Burning is an erotically fiery poem. Every touch of lust is like fire to the nerves, that is why “to carry fire is to become a firefly”, according to the poet. His love interest is the butterfly urged to burn with him, riding him “like a chariot of fire” . There must be an assurance of paradise of flowers for a butterfly that died by fire, if that paradise won’t be another hell for such butterfly to burn again.
In HELL NO! HELL FIRE, the poet seeks to answer his own question about our resistance to hell, because we claim to believe that all that God created is bright and beautiful. This is merely an interrogation of humanity of his self-preserving tendencies. But the answer in this poem remains a gap still waiting to be filled, because no one has an answer to why we run away from the same hell that gives us the beauty of fire aplenty.
This poem presents man as a rational being, although hidden away from the poem. Man only uses things to his benefit, but to not bear the brunt that such thing brings. Man would kill with his gun but not want to die by same. So the poet can be said to be calling all to reform our perceptions of hell as a fearsome reward for evil, if truly God created all for good. But does the poet forget that God created each and every force of nature with good and evil sides? This hell could be the evil side of fire that people run away from. To hell with what hell can do for the greater good!!!
The final poem in this collection, Redemption, much about the preceding poems were aggregated in one composition. Everything about redemption is the catharsis of a voice at the impossibility of a broken soul to become whole again. This is the first step of grief – denial – at a reality that unturned a stone that has been turned. So, that the poem is ironical to the title is not hard to discern. (“Sometimes, a man turns back to a boy/ when his mind turns a journey of no return:/ singing songs of farewell”).
Or how do you redeem a bag of sin thrown into a vast ocean? A sin is washed away of course. The only redemption for what is lost is replacement – by something better. Or what else do you say of a man that “carries every part of himself/ in his mouth like a cigarette on fire./ & burns his body and soul like a rejected poem”? This poem finally climaxes with a part of grief – acceptance:
“when next you find a boy in ashes, write/ a poem before him, in memory of him./ tell him the ocean is in tears, waiting for/ him to bring his body and soul for cleansing.
However, this acceptance is followed by a hope for redemption, which is never a part of grief that exists, but just a replacement for what has been grieved over. Thus, the ashen boy could come back as a new soul entirety, in another baby boy’s body, in another woman’s womb.
This book of six poems takes beauty as a cosmetic that covers the naturalness of grief and vanity. It allays the idea that everything a fire razes is gone. Hence, such could rise again like a phoenix. The philosophical implication is subtly felt while reading this poem. Everything old deserves to be renewed – destruction, loss and memories – with something better. Everything that left deserves a replacement. So this collection engenders a recurring cycle of life around ruins and redemption. To build a new city, an old one is to be “burnt” down. And as the Yoruba adage goes: “A burnt palace is refilled with beauty”. Read this poem and create the possibility of redemption.
– Tukur Ridwan, AW’ Poet, Literary Critic, Essayist and Author of A Boy’s Tears On Earth’s Tongue.
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