#AFTERHOURS

by Inua Ellams

In 2015, Inua Ellams was poet in residence at the Poetry Library at the Southbank Centre in London. His #Afterhours project took him on a voyage of cultural translation and transposition through time and place, to the heart of the libraries archive collections, and through his own life s story as he selected poems published during each year of his life, from birth to the age of 18. In return, Ellams opens up a captivating and potent dialogue between poems, writing a diary and intricately-crafted poems of his own in conversational response to the poems he selected from the library collections. Here, for the first time together, are the collected #Afterhours poems alongside the re-discovered poems which inspired them and the diary entries which follow this journey. In Ellams meticulous hands, this becomes an entire narrative in its own right, compelling and magnetic, drawing parallels of displacement, language and reclamation, and showing poetry s great capacity to be a powerful amplifier of human experience.

Genres: Poetry

Unknown Binding

First published April 1, 2017

Reviews

[David Kenvyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inua Ellams set himself a challenge. He wanted to write a poem for the first 18 years of his life as a response to a poem that was published in the relevant year. This book is what emerged from the project. Ellams tells the reader how he selected the poems to which he would respond, in what the publisher describes as an anthology, a diary, a memoir and a collection of poems. The results are certainly interesting.

Ellams is a Nigerian, who left his country with his parents and moved to London. He then went to Dublin, and then back to London. His family was also remarkable.. His father was Moslem and his mother, Christian, and he had a twin sister. Anyone who knows about Nigeria will be aware that a marriage between a Moslem and a Christian would not be received well by either community. Anyone who has read Ben Okri’s “The Famished Road” will know that the birth if twins could signify that one of them was a spirit child.

Ellams wants his poetic responses to the chosen British poems to be firmly rooted in his Nigerian culture, which is vibrant and noisy and outgoing. These are not words that you would necessarily connect with British culture, and so the response poems contrast quite strongly to the originals that have been chosen. That is part of the joy of the book. For instance, Jo Shapcott’s poem about sheep shearing is contrasted with the preparation of a ram being sacrificed for the Eid celebration. These are both poems about strength, about manliness, but because of the nature of the event being described, they have a very different feel to them. Another example is Robert Crawford’s “Transformer” which is about a railway travelling between Pictish stones. The response is about a plane taking the author as a child from the land of Achebe away from Africa. Each response poem is different from the original, but it is an appropriate response. The hardest to read is the response to Pascale Petit’s “My Father’s Lungs” which is about the suicide of Ellams’ friend, Stephen. It is still an appropriate response.

This is, in many ways, a strange book, but that very strangeness is one of its great attractions. If you care about poetry, this is a book that you should read.

[Deaddad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inua Ellams spent 12 months at the National Poetry Library reading and researching British poets published between 1984 and 2002. He selects one poem per year and then writes a response, a ‘re-setting’ of the poem drawing autobiographical and inter-cultural parallels with his own life. It has the sub-title ‘anthology / diary / memoir / poems’ which is accurate but doesn’t suggest the richness that lies within. It is a fascinating and insightful project and journey and a delightfully multi-faceted reading experience.

I found his diary entries about the process of reading and writing astute and engaging, I was introduced to many poets new to me and his reflections on his own life and experiences are tender, honest and thoughtful. Towards the end he shares a friends’ reflection that his writing is about Identity, Displacement and Destiny. I loved the notion of his ‘Irish/English/Nigerian-hood… [the] Rubik’s Cube I keep unpacking’. His reflections on another friend’s suicide and the re-setting of a Pacale Petit poem to address this are both deeply moving. His re-settings of Moniza Alvi’s ‘Map Of India’ and Andrew Motion’s ‘The Aftermath’ are also highlights.

Like any good anthology this feels like a book that will reward future visits richly.

[Ciara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 I love love Inua’s writing! He is such a beautiful storyteller. I went to his performance Search Party in the Barbican earlier this year and he has such a warm, inviting and grounding presence that I could listen to him talk all day. I think I would be greedy and want a book of just his poetry but I did find it interesting the conversation between the original poems and Inua’s rewritten responses. His poems evoked an alluring portrait of his childhood in Nigeria, England & Ireland. I did also like the diary entries which gave insight into how each poem was selected and the writing process.

[Katarzyna Bartoszynska · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really interesting project; an autobiography, of sorts, as the author writes poems in response to poems that were published for each year of his life, looking for resonances or common themes. He includes a diary describing the process of collection, and all of these things together become a meditation on poetry, life writing, and adaptation. I was fascinated by the kinds of things that Ellams wanted out of the poems he collected, and what were differences that seemed insurmountable to him.