Ifeoluwa Mokelu
The Programme Directorate of the Committee for Relevant Art (CORA) has announced it will feature Professor Niyi Osundare’s latest poetry collection, ‘GREEN: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet’, in its Reading/Signing Session on Sunday, February 20, 2022.
Themed ‘An Evening With Professor Niyi Ogundare,’ CORA is co-organizing the reading and book signing event with Roving Heights Bookstores, and will have the Nigerian poet laureate in attendance.
The preeminent poet laureate will read sections from the collection before a live audience that would converge at the Roving Heights’ outlet at Plot 2&3, Water Corporation Drive, Landmark Centre, Victoria Island, Lagos at 4 pm.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelAn updated statement from CORA’s Programme Directorate, on Saturday, afternoon, confirmed that there would also be virtual broadcast of the event.
Professor Osundare’s Anthology was released in January, 2022. Published by Commonwealth Books, in conjunction with Black Widow Press, ‘Green:Sighs of Our Ailing Planet’ is a “compilation of poems reflecting on the environment and the current spate of odds and challenges
facing its survival, especially with the perennial disrespect visited on it by humans,” the press releasefrom CORA stated.
“Inspired by the spate of environmental crises hitting the world, from the Amazon wildfire to the desert encroachment in North Africa to the shrinking of the Lake Chad basin in his home country Nigeria, the collection urges readers to reflect on the endangered beauty of nature.
“Of all my 20-something books of poetry, none has confronted me with a more challenging combination of urgency of content and complexity of execution than this new one,” Osundare, professor emeritus currently at the New Orleans University, was quoted as saying.
“I daresay the existential imperative of its content has been responsible for the pain that came with its composition and the uneasy relief I now feel upon its completion.
“There is something deeply spiritual, almost religious, about the mission and the message of the poems, and the many ways they have turned out to be denizens of that vital interface between the ecological and the cosmic.”
Osundare, widely revered for his lyrical lines and verses, and about the most laureated poet of his generation, has published over 18 collections, four plays, a book of essays, numerous monographs and articles as well as over 70 journals and magazines across the world.
He has received many prizes and awards, including the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) prize, the Cadbury/ANA Prize (twice), the Commonwealth poetry prize, the Noma Award, Tchicaya U Tam’si prize for African poetry (Africa’s highest poetry award), among others.
