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Daphne's Lot
The masterful wedding of the narrative and the lyric in these poems (whose subject is the maturation of a sensibility, the coming-of-age of a young Englishwoman the power of her ties to family, husband and her "adopted" country, Nigeria as well as the illumination of her own soul and that of the narrator's) fills the reader with both sorrow and wonder. It is an instructive tale for our age its vision of the individual will and imagination resisting the madness of politics and the destruction of war is singular and profound. (Description by Carol Muske-Dukes)
112 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2003
2 people are currently reading
95 people want to read
About the author
Chris Abani
62 books282 followersChristopher Abani (or Chris Abani) is a Nigerian author.
He was a political prisoner in Nigeria at various times during 1985 and 1991. At times he was held in solitary confinement and he was held on death row for some time after being sentenced to death for treason.
He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Awards, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Selections of his poetry appear in the online journal Blackbird.
He was a political prisoner in Nigeria at various times during 1985 and 1991. At times he was held in solitary confinement and he was held on death row for some time after being sentenced to death for treason.
He is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside and the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Awards, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Selections of his poetry appear in the online journal Blackbird.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 18, 2023
A bit scattered and hard to read. Left a lot of questions unanswered.
If you don't know anything about Biafra and the war in the 1960s many of the references will pass you by — I'm afraid I missed more than I gleaned.
However, there are beautiful moments and details, and the evocative use of landscapes to advance his themes. Overall, though, the structure does not serve the narrative.
[It pains me to write this, because Abani's novel [book:GraceLand|41250] is simply stellar!]
If you don't know anything about Biafra and the war in the 1960s many of the references will pass you by — I'm afraid I missed more than I gleaned.
However, there are beautiful moments and details, and the evocative use of landscapes to advance his themes. Overall, though, the structure does not serve the narrative.
[It pains me to write this, because Abani's novel [book:GraceLand|41250] is simply stellar!]
Read
June 14, 2021Such a smooth read you never even notice it is a whole story written in poem format. Go directly to page 64 to read about the type of man Chris thought his mother (his real life mother who had a very trouble relationship with his real life father) would want. I heard him read that expert at the Calabash Festival and have never forgotten that moment. "I want a man who smiles when he thinks of me...."
August 30, 2025
Chris Abani’s *Daphne’s Lot*, read in the shadow of 2005 but resonant even now, is one of those rare collections that refuses to be pigeonholed either as autobiographical confession or pure lyric imagination; instead, it moves between memory and myth, history and private grief, and the personal body and the wounded landscapes of nations.
To enter these poems is to walk into a hybrid terrain where intimacy is inseparable from political violence, where tenderness is constantly shadowed by rupture, and where love itself often takes the form of elegy.
The book’s title signals this tension: Daphne, the mythic figure who escapes desire by transforming into a tree, and “lot”, which suggests both inheritance and burden, the land allotted by fate as much as the weight one is destined to carry. Abani, who has written across genres and who has survived both political imprisonment and exile, builds here a testament to the ways poetry can hold both the radiant and the ruinous without collapsing one into the other.
The collection is threaded with images of survival and transmission—family, ancestry, the act of remembering—and yet it is never sentimental in the easy sense. Abani’s language is spare, sometimes even brutal in its simplicity, and yet he threads it with music so subtle that the reader feels carried along almost against their will.
One of the most striking poems, “Sanctuary”, exemplifies this doubleness. It begins as a kind of meditation on the body as a house of both desire and violation, and moves outward into the city as a space where violence always lurks beneath surface gestures. The poem suggests that sanctuary is both necessary and impossible, that we are always seeking safety but always vulnerable to intrusion. The resonance here with the poet’s own biography—his childhood in Nigeria, his imprisonment, the long shadow of civil war—is undeniable, but Abani never reduces the poem to memoir. Instead, he renders the condition universal: the body as fragile shelter, the home as tenuous refuge, and the city as precarious community.
Another unforgettable piece is “Museum”, in which Abani catalogues the relics of personal and historical trauma as though they belonged behind glass. The poem plays with the idea of how we curate memory, how we place objects on display to stand in for experiences that cannot be fully captured. There is an irony here, a sly critique of the way institutions sanitise and frame suffering, but also a recognition that the act of curation is unavoidable.
Every survivor becomes a kind of curator, arranging fragments into a coherent story for others to witness. In reading the poem, one cannot help but think of other modern poets—say, Carolyn Forché with her “poetry of witness”, or even the fractured memory-objects in Paul Celan’s work—who use the lyric to stage testimony rather than to polish self-expression. Abani joins this lineage, but his voice is distinctly his own: more rooted in the textures of African modernity, more attuned to the intersection of myth, migration, and the personal archive.
The title poem, “Daphne’s Lot”, perhaps most perfectly crystallises the tension between myth and history that threads through the book. In retelling the myth of Daphne, Abani does not simply rehearse the story of metamorphosis as escape from male pursuit. Instead, he refracts it through his own sense of what it means to inherit a burden, to carry history in the flesh.
Daphne’s transformation becomes a metaphor for survival through self-erasure but also for the cost of becoming rooted, of losing mobility in order to preserve one’s integrity. The “lot” is both her fate and her field, the ground where her roots must dig in, whether she chooses it or not. This poem resonates with modern concerns of exile and diaspora: the way one becomes marked by a history one did not choose, the way survival often demands a painful transformation that leaves one forever divided from the past self.
Reading this poem in 2005, with its mythic cadences and its haunted undertones, one cannot help but feel that it was also speaking to the contemporary condition of displacement and migration, of carrying ancestral violence into new geographies.
What gives *Daphne’s Lot* its distinctive power is Abani’s ability to shift registers—moving from stark, almost reportorial lines to sudden eruptions of lyricism. In “Elegy for My Mother”, the voice is hushed, stripped of ornament, as though grief itself forbids excessive language.
He writes not to elevate her into myth but to honour the precise details that remain: gestures, small words, and the daily habits that anchor memory. Yet even here, the mythic undercurrent is never far away; the mother is both a personal figure and an emblem of endurance, an Orpheus who sings across the divide of death. In comparing this to modern poets, one might think of Louise Glück’s *Ararat* or Seamus Heaney’s elegies for his mother and father, poems where intimacy and myth cross-pollinate, where the domestic moment is charged with ancient weight.
Abani belongs in this company, but he brings to it a postcolonial awareness: the mother is also a figure caught in the histories of Nigeria, of displacement, of hybrid cultural inheritance. Grief here is not private alone; it is haunted by colonial and national legacies.
There is also humour in Abani’s work, though it is of a particularly dark and wry variety. In poems like “Exile”, he plays with the clichés of the immigrant experience, twisting them into lines that are both biting and tender. The exile’s condition is not romanticised; it is awkward, absurd, sometimes even comic. Yet the humour is never at the expense of depth. Instead, it serves as a kind of survival strategy, a way to keep despair from collapsing into silence. In this, Abani resembles someone like Derek Walcott, who could render the Caribbean experience with both fierce critique and comic levity, or even a contemporary poet like Warsan Shire, who turns the migrant’s wounds into startling, sharp-edged metaphors. Abani is part of this global constellation, giving voice to the experience of dislocation in a manner that is both local and universal.
One of the book’s most compelling features is its structure: the poems accumulate like fragments of a mosaic, each piece adding to an image that is never complete. There is no linear narrative, no single “I” guiding us through. Instead, Abani employs multiple vantage points and multiple tones, as though to suggest that no single voice can encompass the weight of history or the fullness of memory.
This fragmented approach feels profoundly modern, resonating with the fractured forms of poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, but Abani’s fragmentation is warmer, less cerebral, more infused with blood and memory. It reminds us that fragmentation is not just an aesthetic choice but the lived reality of those who inherit broken histories.
Reading *Daphne’s Lot* today, after the intervening years, one cannot help but feel how prescient Abani’s themes remain. The global crises of migration, the persistence of war, the precarity of refuge—these are not abstract issues but the very terrain on which Abani has always written. His poems are not journalistic accounts, but they carry within them a moral witness, a demand that we see the individual lives behind the headlines. In this, he is closer to poets like Mahmoud Darwish or Forché, who use lyric intensity to pierce through abstraction, to bring us face to face with the human cost of history.
At the same time, Abani’s work is deeply personal. One feels the presence of his own scars, his own reckonings, but also his own tenderness, his yearning for connection, his moments of grace. The book, given as an anniversary gift in 2005, resonates as a gift precisely because it insists on the intermingling of love and loss, of inheritance and transformation.
To read it in that context is to recognise how the poems themselves are about gift and burden, about what we pass down and what we carry. The myth of Daphne becomes not only a myth of escape but also a myth of love’s costs, of the transformations we undergo in order to hold on to one another through history’s storms.
Abani’s role in modern poetry cannot be overstated. He stands at the intersection of African modernism, diasporic poetics, and global witness. His work refuses the binaries of tradition and modernity, of myth and history, of personal and political. Instead, he inhabits the interstices, showing us how the lyric can hold contradictions without resolving them.
Compared to his contemporaries, Abani is perhaps less famous than Walcott or Heaney, but his contribution is no less vital: he has carved out a poetics of witness that is also a poetics of intimacy, a voice that insists on the inseparability of tenderness and terror.
In the end, *Daphne’s Lot* is not a book that offers resolution. It leaves us unsettled, transformed, rooted and unrooted at once—like Daphne herself. It reminds us that poetry’s task is not to heal history but to speak it, to sing it, to bear witness in language that itself bears the scars of silence.
To read these poems is to feel both the weight of inheritance and the possibility of grace, to walk away carrying a burden that is also a gift.
To enter these poems is to walk into a hybrid terrain where intimacy is inseparable from political violence, where tenderness is constantly shadowed by rupture, and where love itself often takes the form of elegy.
The book’s title signals this tension: Daphne, the mythic figure who escapes desire by transforming into a tree, and “lot”, which suggests both inheritance and burden, the land allotted by fate as much as the weight one is destined to carry. Abani, who has written across genres and who has survived both political imprisonment and exile, builds here a testament to the ways poetry can hold both the radiant and the ruinous without collapsing one into the other.
The collection is threaded with images of survival and transmission—family, ancestry, the act of remembering—and yet it is never sentimental in the easy sense. Abani’s language is spare, sometimes even brutal in its simplicity, and yet he threads it with music so subtle that the reader feels carried along almost against their will.
One of the most striking poems, “Sanctuary”, exemplifies this doubleness. It begins as a kind of meditation on the body as a house of both desire and violation, and moves outward into the city as a space where violence always lurks beneath surface gestures. The poem suggests that sanctuary is both necessary and impossible, that we are always seeking safety but always vulnerable to intrusion. The resonance here with the poet’s own biography—his childhood in Nigeria, his imprisonment, the long shadow of civil war—is undeniable, but Abani never reduces the poem to memoir. Instead, he renders the condition universal: the body as fragile shelter, the home as tenuous refuge, and the city as precarious community.
Another unforgettable piece is “Museum”, in which Abani catalogues the relics of personal and historical trauma as though they belonged behind glass. The poem plays with the idea of how we curate memory, how we place objects on display to stand in for experiences that cannot be fully captured. There is an irony here, a sly critique of the way institutions sanitise and frame suffering, but also a recognition that the act of curation is unavoidable.
Every survivor becomes a kind of curator, arranging fragments into a coherent story for others to witness. In reading the poem, one cannot help but think of other modern poets—say, Carolyn Forché with her “poetry of witness”, or even the fractured memory-objects in Paul Celan’s work—who use the lyric to stage testimony rather than to polish self-expression. Abani joins this lineage, but his voice is distinctly his own: more rooted in the textures of African modernity, more attuned to the intersection of myth, migration, and the personal archive.
The title poem, “Daphne’s Lot”, perhaps most perfectly crystallises the tension between myth and history that threads through the book. In retelling the myth of Daphne, Abani does not simply rehearse the story of metamorphosis as escape from male pursuit. Instead, he refracts it through his own sense of what it means to inherit a burden, to carry history in the flesh.
Daphne’s transformation becomes a metaphor for survival through self-erasure but also for the cost of becoming rooted, of losing mobility in order to preserve one’s integrity. The “lot” is both her fate and her field, the ground where her roots must dig in, whether she chooses it or not. This poem resonates with modern concerns of exile and diaspora: the way one becomes marked by a history one did not choose, the way survival often demands a painful transformation that leaves one forever divided from the past self.
Reading this poem in 2005, with its mythic cadences and its haunted undertones, one cannot help but feel that it was also speaking to the contemporary condition of displacement and migration, of carrying ancestral violence into new geographies.
What gives *Daphne’s Lot* its distinctive power is Abani’s ability to shift registers—moving from stark, almost reportorial lines to sudden eruptions of lyricism. In “Elegy for My Mother”, the voice is hushed, stripped of ornament, as though grief itself forbids excessive language.
He writes not to elevate her into myth but to honour the precise details that remain: gestures, small words, and the daily habits that anchor memory. Yet even here, the mythic undercurrent is never far away; the mother is both a personal figure and an emblem of endurance, an Orpheus who sings across the divide of death. In comparing this to modern poets, one might think of Louise Glück’s *Ararat* or Seamus Heaney’s elegies for his mother and father, poems where intimacy and myth cross-pollinate, where the domestic moment is charged with ancient weight.
Abani belongs in this company, but he brings to it a postcolonial awareness: the mother is also a figure caught in the histories of Nigeria, of displacement, of hybrid cultural inheritance. Grief here is not private alone; it is haunted by colonial and national legacies.
There is also humour in Abani’s work, though it is of a particularly dark and wry variety. In poems like “Exile”, he plays with the clichés of the immigrant experience, twisting them into lines that are both biting and tender. The exile’s condition is not romanticised; it is awkward, absurd, sometimes even comic. Yet the humour is never at the expense of depth. Instead, it serves as a kind of survival strategy, a way to keep despair from collapsing into silence. In this, Abani resembles someone like Derek Walcott, who could render the Caribbean experience with both fierce critique and comic levity, or even a contemporary poet like Warsan Shire, who turns the migrant’s wounds into startling, sharp-edged metaphors. Abani is part of this global constellation, giving voice to the experience of dislocation in a manner that is both local and universal.
One of the book’s most compelling features is its structure: the poems accumulate like fragments of a mosaic, each piece adding to an image that is never complete. There is no linear narrative, no single “I” guiding us through. Instead, Abani employs multiple vantage points and multiple tones, as though to suggest that no single voice can encompass the weight of history or the fullness of memory.
This fragmented approach feels profoundly modern, resonating with the fractured forms of poets like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, but Abani’s fragmentation is warmer, less cerebral, more infused with blood and memory. It reminds us that fragmentation is not just an aesthetic choice but the lived reality of those who inherit broken histories.
Reading *Daphne’s Lot* today, after the intervening years, one cannot help but feel how prescient Abani’s themes remain. The global crises of migration, the persistence of war, the precarity of refuge—these are not abstract issues but the very terrain on which Abani has always written. His poems are not journalistic accounts, but they carry within them a moral witness, a demand that we see the individual lives behind the headlines. In this, he is closer to poets like Mahmoud Darwish or Forché, who use lyric intensity to pierce through abstraction, to bring us face to face with the human cost of history.
At the same time, Abani’s work is deeply personal. One feels the presence of his own scars, his own reckonings, but also his own tenderness, his yearning for connection, his moments of grace. The book, given as an anniversary gift in 2005, resonates as a gift precisely because it insists on the intermingling of love and loss, of inheritance and transformation.
To read it in that context is to recognise how the poems themselves are about gift and burden, about what we pass down and what we carry. The myth of Daphne becomes not only a myth of escape but also a myth of love’s costs, of the transformations we undergo in order to hold on to one another through history’s storms.
Abani’s role in modern poetry cannot be overstated. He stands at the intersection of African modernism, diasporic poetics, and global witness. His work refuses the binaries of tradition and modernity, of myth and history, of personal and political. Instead, he inhabits the interstices, showing us how the lyric can hold contradictions without resolving them.
Compared to his contemporaries, Abani is perhaps less famous than Walcott or Heaney, but his contribution is no less vital: he has carved out a poetics of witness that is also a poetics of intimacy, a voice that insists on the inseparability of tenderness and terror.
In the end, *Daphne’s Lot* is not a book that offers resolution. It leaves us unsettled, transformed, rooted and unrooted at once—like Daphne herself. It reminds us that poetry’s task is not to heal history but to speak it, to sing it, to bear witness in language that itself bears the scars of silence.
To read these poems is to feel both the weight of inheritance and the possibility of grace, to walk away carrying a burden that is also a gift.
December 17, 2016
War is a hard thing to write about. The first two-thirds of this collection are a single long epic about Abani's mother, which works best when it focuses on the personal costs of war, highlighting its horrors through the day-to-day struggles of his family. The language, often sparse, bursts out into the occasional striking metaphor, more powerful for its unexpected arrival; evacuation flights are "irregular as constipated priests who on first arrival/ate only bread, not trusting the unfamiliarity/of yams," while in a more reflective passage, Abani ponders his father's emotional limitations:
Ultimately, though, I found the title poem a little overlong and unfocused. Too often it drifts from its putative goal of being an "epic about a woman"; the author himself comes through as the protagonist, while his mother drifts away to become a side character in her own story. Tighter editing would have made for stronger poetry. (Tighter proofreading, too; throughout the book, plurals are formed with apostrophes and spaces are either doubled or missing. It's possible the non-standard orthography is meant to support the poetry, but if so, I was never able to grasp its intent. It felt like simply poor typesetting.)
The shorter poems at the end of the collection felt, perhaps particularly because of the contrast with the intensely personal opening epic, too generalized to have much power. I found "Corned Beef" the strongest, but none of them have lingered in my mind since closing the book.
And did he ever explore his inner skin, safe like
an umbrella's shelter, or did he, like me, shy away,
believing as he was told, that touching the inner skin
of an umbrella causes it to leak, the rain overwhelming?
Ultimately, though, I found the title poem a little overlong and unfocused. Too often it drifts from its putative goal of being an "epic about a woman"; the author himself comes through as the protagonist, while his mother drifts away to become a side character in her own story. Tighter editing would have made for stronger poetry. (Tighter proofreading, too; throughout the book, plurals are formed with apostrophes and spaces are either doubled or missing. It's possible the non-standard orthography is meant to support the poetry, but if so, I was never able to grasp its intent. It felt like simply poor typesetting.)
The shorter poems at the end of the collection felt, perhaps particularly because of the contrast with the intensely personal opening epic, too generalized to have much power. I found "Corned Beef" the strongest, but none of them have lingered in my mind since closing the book.
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