A Pagan Place

included in Eight New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set

Akashic Books

Akinlabi gracefully takes us through varying landscapes of Africa: from his native Nigeria through Ghana, the Congo, and Libya. All the while his interests are less in the physical place and more in the sense of place, perhaps even the psyche of place, of what it means to occupy place as an African in the world… While anchored in an African sensibility, the cartographic is expressed largely through memory and the life of the mind, in a longing for understanding.

Matthew Shenoda, from the preface

A Report from Benghazi

The cameras are candid, maintaining
their fidelity with still more souls adrift.

The sky stretches,
an unrevealing omen of clouds.

The red of revolt reveals
his confidence as sketched.

There is no newer neurosis,
but certainly a professed devotion.

The clammy prayer said, the hand
is free, the soul, emblazoned,

unleashed. A grey of grenade
clouds all, and the footage, sterner now,

locates a moist mural of bones and flesh;
and an unclosed eye piercing

the ambling clouds for beatitudes
foretold.

Peter Akinlabi, “A Report from Benghazi”