Mishaps and Other Poems

Bill NDI’s background and education is rich and diverse, and it is no surprise that the poems presented in Mishaps are of a similar character; highly varied, impressively experimental, sensitive and reflective across an astonishingly broad range of experience, and deeply moving in the richness of their humanity.   Through each of them there resonates Bill’s vision of poetry as a special annunciation and of the poet as seer, as spokesperson, recorder, analyst, adjudicator and above all, as the reminder to each of us of the best that is so easily lost to the deathly universe of habit and blunted perception, to both the deadening routines of daily life and domestic regimes and to the crueller hand of oppression, authoritarianism, and misused authority in all its forms, from the primitive imposition of will through brute power political gangsterism, corruption and ‘state-orchestrated perjury’, as he calls it in ‘Sights Along Abakwa Ring Road’, through to the often less identifiable and far more insidious regimes of international finance, World Bank, ‘Black Debt’, and the hidden swindlings of the international monetary system. 

Many of Bill’s poems are built on the oscillations between freedom and oppression, liberty and authoritarianism in all its forms.  While truly meditative and deeply poetically enriched, his vision of the world is in no way naive, and which is illuminated, perhaps at times darkened, by experience, by a keen sense of the ‘debts of history’ and its need to ‘return the stolen goods’.  The poems draw insight from Bill’s quite remarkably diverse and intensive education, from his upbringing in Ndop, the North West Province of Cameroon, his education in Bamenda, Yaoundé; Nigeria, and thence to the Sorbonne, where he took his degree in Languages, Literatures and Contemporary Civilisations from Paris VIII, and his doctorate from Paris Cergy-Pontoise University.   It is an education, a pilgrimage, a migration across cultures (and now, in its Australian phase, across hemispheres) which fits Bill in a special way to be a seer and spokesperson for new forms of globalised understanding and artistic creativity, and it is this mission and this inspiration which is most conspicuous in the diversity of perceptions, insights, influences and poetic forms through which his vision is articulated.

Bill’s vision is deeply political, and yet, one of the strongest impressions one gains from a reading of his verse is of a determination to retain a sense of the power and freshness of innocence – the possibility, indeed, of a higher form of innocence and freshness of vision, of a kind which need not necessarily die with the onset of knowledge and adult understanding.  Shades of the prison house must inevitably close in, Bill seems to suggest, but in a way that can always be alleviated, separated out from cynicism and despair, through the power of poetic vision and poetic understanding.  First impressions of his poetry suggest a strong influence (though in verse that is altogether modern, experimental in form, socially well-informed, culturally inclusive in an extraordinary measure and thoroughly politically open-eyed) of the early phase of English Romanticism, with echoes, or at least, nuances, of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, or from Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and indeed, the Immortality ode.   His verse neatly picks up and carries on into our era the Romantic articulation of the special links between freedom and creativity – ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ – with the poet’s voice foregrounded continually, in poems such as ‘Heart and Tongue’, and ‘Thinking Freedom’ as the voice that ‘keeps the tune alive’, the visionary spark, the real ‘fuel of life’

If it is, as Schlovsky suggested, the business of art to defamiliarise’ our experience, and rescue us from a world where ‘habit devours everything’, so it is Bill’s business, in Mishaps and Other Poems, to rescue language and poetry itself from a similar fate, and each of his poems offers a new perspective, an investigation into the power of our language, its history (he sometimes favours archaic phrasings, with their power to lift and focus our aesthetic perception) and the resources that language offers for a form of ‘painting on the page’, not just as a display of ingenuity, spurious ‘originality’ and verbal trickery, but as guiding and refreshing our perceptions, as leading our meditations from phase to phase, as in his haunting poem ‘My Epitaph’ where the shift in structure invites an alternative ‘point of view’ a perspective refreshed and defamiliarised just one more time, within the duration of the poem itself.  Throughout this poems, as both linguistic Insider and Outsider, as a speaker and writer of English as just one language among many alternatives equally at his command, as scholar and poet both raiding and reflecting upon the archive, Bill offers in his poetic practice true structural complexity, high verbal play and a mastery of all the devices of irony and symbolic representation, while at the same time showing himself capable of a Blakean epigrammatic terseness, as in a poem such as ‘Advice’, with its truncated but powerful imagery, or as in ‘VAL (Veracious, Admirable, Lovable)’ a love poem which is of impressive simplicity and yet which gains great power on that account.  It is a simple love poem, but with great POWER on that account.  In all, Bill NDI’s poetry offers us much, a rich range of reflection, and in its wealth and diversity, the promise of much more to come.  It is to be welcomed.

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Softcover

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