Prisoner of Love: A Poetry Chapbook

Book excerpt: This collection of poems navigates love’s place in the human experience. I place emphasis on “the place of love” because I believe that every poet is driven by a certain shade of love to birth the deepest of poetic pieces. For example, the poet, JP Clark, was driven by the “place of love” to write “Ibadan”. In this collection, the poet uses simple diction to navigate deep and complicated human emotions. We see that in the poem, “Seeds of Love”: The foundation of our love wasn’t strong; it was built on sinking sands, and as hail and sandstorms threatened, our love crashed like a sandcastle. And I think this is what makes this collection unique. Here, we see a poet who is content with the simplicity of language, the lightness of metaphors to express emotions. The poems find their relativity in the softness of their language. As expected, in exploring the “place of love”, these love poems are not just about the flowery feeling and the butterflies that love elicits; no, they mention the heartbreak, the hurt that comes along with it, for is love not about pain and betrayal too? This collection is not only about the “place of love”; as I mentioned earlier, driven by another shade of love, the poet also explores the “love of body” as seen in the poem, “My Body”: I have learnt to love my body with its scars, to treat it like a prized ornament, to worship it and give it the care it deserves. I have learnt to love myself. You will also see poems about the “love of place”, where the poet dissects the soul of his nation, where he mourns a nation that sends her children out to the harsh experience of becoming immigrants in another country. In all, this is a graceful collection of poems, thematically linked in their concerns, yet diverse in the kinds of emotions each one will provoke in the reader.