Waiting Laughters

Waiting Laughters
Author: Niyi Osundare
Publisher: Niyi Osundare
Total Pages: 112
Release: 1990
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

Waiting Laughters is Osundare's second volume of poetry, published to critical acclaim. In 1991, it won The Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, the most prestigious book prize for new works published within the African continent. The collection is conceived as a poetic response to the gloom and despair gripping contemporary African society: the poems emphasise the possibility of laughter and its diverse manifestations. The style of the poetry is reflective of oral and Yoruba literary traditions.

Niyi Osundare, a Literary Biography

Niyi Osundare, a Literary Biography
Author: Sule E. Egya
Publisher: Sevhage/Winepress
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2017
Genre: Poets, Nigerian
ISBN: 9789785489903

In this literary biography, Sule E. Egya, one of Nigeria's most promising scholar-critics, brings the skills of the storyteller and the scholar to bear on his recreation of the Osundare story. The result is a readable coming-of-age story that traces the writer's development from his rural and agrarian roots in Nigeria, through his education in Africa, Europe and North America, to his rise to prominence as one of the most versatile poets writing in English today. There can be no better platform to register the debt that Osundare owes his parentage, the rigorous discipline of his mentors and the diverse environments in which his outlook on the world has been shaped than this carefully crafted biography. Egya highlights Osundare's prodigious talent, his unwavering ethical compass, his infectious humanism, his enduring faith in the capacity of literature to reshape the world, and the harmony between his creative imagination and polemical writing. Readers and critics will find the biography an indispensable companion to reading Osundare not just because of the illuminating personal and cultural information that it offers, but also because it equally periodizes Osundare's work in a way no other book has done. Prof. Oyeniyi Okunoye, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife In Niyi Osundare: A Literary Biography, Sule E. Egya takes us on a journey of the life experiences of the artist-scholar Niyi Osundare. Indeed, there are some books a reader just can't put down. This is one of them. It takes you to the other worlds beyond the popular world of artistry and scholarship of one of Africa's most accomplished men of letters. Dr. Ogaga Okuyade, Niger Delta University, Wilberforce Island.

Songs of the Season

Songs of the Season
Author: Niyi Osundare
Publisher: Fourth Dimension Publishing Company
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1990
Genre: Poetry
ISBN:

These poems from one of Africa's most highly acclaimed poets and the winner of the 1991 Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, are an ironic celebration of collective aspirations, failures, guilts and hopes. They call for change in a society wracked with problems. The poet sets out to produce a collection that captures the significant happenings of the time in a tune that is simple, accessible, topical, relevant, and artistically pleasing and, as he puts it: 'to remind kings about the corpses which line their way to the throne, to show the rich the slums which fester behind their castles, to praise virtue, denounce vice, to mirror the triumphs and travails of the downtrodden, to celebrate the green glory of the rainy season and the brown accent of the dry, to distil poetry from the dust and clay of the vast, prodigious land - songs plucked from the lips of my land in its manifold laughters and sorrows.'

Green

Green
Author: Niyi Osundare
Publisher: Black Widow Press
Total Pages: 132
Release: 2022-02-21
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 9781737160335

Niyi Osundare's latest book of poems, Green: Sighs Of Our Ailing Planet, is a critical pastoral of poems concerning the environment around the world--A poet of renown who has travelled and given performances in many parts of the world, he has felt and tried to put into words what he has felt in what he has seen-from the Amazon to the deserts of North Africa to his home country of Nigeria. For him it was the nature speaking to him and through him, pleading and imploring...but still beautiful? Lushness of destruction, transmuted from a nature endangered....an accessible plea from nature through Osundare's words. A book relevant and hopeful for people to stop and reflect on the endangered beauty of all of nature. In the words of Niyi Osundare: 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. 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...

The Eye of the Earth

The Eye of the Earth
Author: Niyi Osundare
Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria) Limited
Total Pages: 72
Release: 1986
Genre: History
ISBN:

A lyrical and panoramic body of poems from the prize-winning poet, informed by a revolutionary vision about the earth, our home.

Village Voices

Village Voices
Author: Niyi Osundare
Publisher:
Total Pages: 86
Release: 1984
Genre: African poetry (English)
ISBN:

Time and Nature in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare

Time and Nature in the Poetry of Niyi Osundare
Author: Chukwunwike Anolue
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2024-08-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040087817

This book provides an ecocritical analysis of the poetry of the famous Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare. It interrogates the intricate interface between time and nature in 11 of Osundare’s defining poetry collections. This is a book of postcolonial ecocriticism from an African perspective. It brings together the ecocritical theory of animism and theories of geologic time in the discussion of Osundare’s poetry. Osundare shows that animism has a lot to offer in enriching human understanding of the ecosystem. And while he eloquently catalogues problems undermining the health of the earth in this age of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene in his poetry, he also holds on to the hope of a better future. The book concludes that Osundare’s optimism is what informs his use of poetry to press humankind to rise to the duty of salvaging the environment. Deploying an interdisciplinary approach that stretches across the fields of literature, religion, geology, physics, economics, and anthropology, this book will be an important read for those looking for fresh ways to understand Osundare’s poetry and African nature writing.

City Without People

City Without People
Author: Niyi Osundare
Publisher: Tradeselect
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Hurricane Katrina, 2005
ISBN: 9780983707912

Niyi Osundare, one of Africa's most prominent poets and resident of New Orleans, La was one of the many whose life was caught in the destructive force of hurricane Katrina. Rescued by a neighbor with a boat, losing all that he had, exiled without even an identification to several states, he returned to rebuild his life and house. Written over the last five years, these poems recount both his loss and a thank you to those who helped.