Tanure Ojaide is a well-known Nigerian poet, but he is also the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Africana Studies at UNC Charlotte. I met Tanure shortly after he came to UNC Charlotte in 1990, but it was not until last year that our mutual interest in poetry intersected. Shortly after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, the editor of Exchange (a publication of UNC Charlotte’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences) decided to run an article about the response of UNC Charlotte’s poets to COVID-19. Tanure and I were among the poets the editor interviewed, and each of us had a poem included in the article: https://exchange.uncc.edu/poets-reflect-on-impact-of-challenges-on-human-spirit/ In both cases, our poems were about taking walks during the quarantine, but our paths soon diverged. Whereas I wrote just one poem related to the pandemic, Tanure went on to write an entire collection on this topic. Titled Narrow Escapes: A Poetic Diary of the Coronavirus Pandemic, this collection came out this month from Spears Books. For more information about this book, please click on the following link: https://spearsmedia.com/shop/narrow-escapes/
Tanure asked me if I would write a blurb for the book, and I happily agreed. As I state in my blurb, Narrow Escapes is presented as a series of poetic diary entries, spanning from March 19, 2020, to October 31, 2020. Each of the poems is a response to the coronavirus pandemic, but they vary in focus from the global impact of the pandemic to the very personal impact on one’s family members. All of these poems pack an emotional wallop, but the personal ones are especially gut wrenching. For example, the poem “When the Coronavirus Comes to the House” captures perfectly the anxiety and anguish that parents feel when their children are stricken by a deadly virus. In many ways, this poetic diary has the feel of a verse novel, for there is a continuing narrative that ties these poems together. The poems in Narrow Escapes narrate the unrelenting progression of a global pandemic. It is a narrative that we all are experiencing, and that is what gives this book its universal appeal.
