27/11/2025
Nigerian poet Annah Atane presents two poems that inhabit the horror of war and massacre where collective catastrophe is confronted with private mourning. These verses draw their imagery from slaughter, war, and the fragility of hope and the despair where memory is born from “butchery.” “Scalpels on a Sunday Hymn” traverses the sinister space of the slaughterhouse as the site where atrocity destroys innocence, where grief stands frigid, and where memory begins from wounds. The poem’s pastoral motifs are shrouded under the weight of brute force and violence, giving way to versification that is stunned yet compelled by what it must describe and name, sans pretense. In a similar tone, “Home of Crease” moves into the streets shaped by conflict, chasing a mother’s elegiac song that runs through a landscape where loss becomes an incision that cuts through lament and the endurance necessitated to speak. Both of these poems by Annah are marked by unsentimental grief that rejects spectacle, resisting the safe distance that is customary to imagery and metaphor, while maintaining the dignity of a poetic voice that enunciates through ruin as it approaches devastation with an unapologetic and unsettling clarity.
Nigerian poet Annah Atane presents two poems that inhabit the horror of war and massacre where collective catastrophe is confronted with private mourning. These verses draw their imagery from
