The Mokwa flood sequence (poems 31–37) represents Shehu’s most sustained engagement with the politics of infrastructure and state neglect.
In the long, fraught genealogy of African protest poetry—from the Okigboan fragmentation to the caustic urbanity of Ojaide’s Niger Delta elegies—there emerges with striking clarity a voice that has laboured for nearly four decades in relative obscurity, only now to arrive with the cumulative force of a prophecy long deferred.
Published in February 2026, this fifth collection arrives at a moment when Nigeria’s compound crises—economic precarity, environmental catastrophe, state violence, and a haemorrhaging of its human capital—seem to demand a poetic response adequate to the scale of the disaster.
Shehu answers not with the hermetic ironies of late-modernist withdrawal, nor with the easy comforts of Afro-optimist branding, but with something far more difficult: a scripture of the ordinary, an epic of the overlooked.
The collection’s governing conceit is announced with deceptive modesty. Sixty-two poems (including the sequence “Down to the Refrain” and the closing “Nunc Dimitis”) are figured as footnotes—the apparatus of scholarly and legal discourse, the fine print that confirms or subverts the main text. Shehu inverts this hierarchy with the force of a political manifesto.
The “main text,” in his accounting, is the official narrative of the Nigerian state: the communiqués from Aso Rock, the padded budgets, the National Broadcasts delivered from marble halls. The footnotes, by contrast, are the lived realities that this official story is designed to obscure: the calloused hand of the bricklayer, the “stolen dawn” of the ten-year-old hawker, the fisherman’s net returning heavy with crude and light with tilapia.
This is a sophisticated and internally coherent aesthetic programme. Chioma L. Enwerem, in a capacious foreword, rightly identifies the collection’s central gesture as “poetic reclamation,” and Shehu executes it with remarkable formal consistency across the book’s four loose movements.
The first, comprising poems 1–19, traces an arc from silence to utterance—from the “tethered tongue” of “Elder’s Gaze” and the “kolanut’s red ancestral eyes” that “bind my voice / to the circle’s ancient will” in “Beneath The Kolanut’s Weight,” through the slow, tectonic rebellion of “Stir of the Harmattan” and “Cracks in the Baobab’s Skin,” to the triumphant communal chorus of “Dance of the Unbound Tongue” and “Chorus of the River’s Mouth.”
This is the collection’s most formally achieved sequence, and it bears comparison to the mythopoetic architecture of Okigbo’s HEAVENSGATE or the ritual progressions in Soyinka’s IDANRE, though Shehu’s register is decidedly more vernacular and his politics more explicitly materialist.
The opening poem, “Palmwine For Elusive Eyes,” serves as an ars poetica of remarkable clarity. Shehu explicitly rejects the Western classical tradition—”I call you / not from distant Olympus”—in favour of an autochthonous muse drawn from the “pulse of this ancient soil,” from the “Niger’s bend, the Benue’s embrace.” This is not merely nativist posture.
Shehu’s muse is synesthetic and deeply embedded: she winks “from the curve of a danfo’s horn,” hides “in the rhythm of talking drums,” stirs “in the spice of suya smoke rising / over flickering lanterns.” The poem’s achievement is to ground the act of poetic making in the sensorium of everyday Nigerian life without sacrificing lyric intensity.
“Kiss the Truth,” which follows, extends this programme with a daring extended metaphor. Here the muse is a trader in the Kantin Kwari market, “haggling for the price / of a metaphor,” her wrapper “tucked firm against the Harmattan’s tongue.” She demands not facile beauty but “the scent of diesel / and the salt of sweat, / the jagged truth of the morning headline.”
The poet, rejected for offering too-thin ink, must “sharpen my stylus / with the edge of a hunger.” This is a poetics of materialist witness that refuses the consolations of the aesthetic. As Shehu puts it in the poem’s closing lines, “to woo the muse / is to woo the storm.”
The collection’s second movement (poems 20–39) constitutes its most ambitious undertaking: a systematic mapping of Nigeria’s dual environmental catastrophe across the North-South axis. “Two Tongues of the Earth” (poem 39) is the theoretical centrepiece, a bravura comparative meditation that finds uncanny symmetry between the Niger Delta’s oil toxicity and the Sahara’s southward advance.
Shehu’s imagery is arrestingly precise: the Delta’s “black gold” becomes a “liquid poison that chokes the silver fish,” while the northern dunes are a “granular ghost that strangles the baobab.”
“Both,” he concludes, “are tongues of a fire that leaves the belly empty.” The poem’s closing couplet—”how do you survive when the North is a parched throat / and the South is a poisoned lung?”—distills the nation’s condition into a single, devastating figure of respiratory distress.
The Delta poems are among the collection’s most viscerally affecting. “Thirst of the Creek” opens with a description of gas flares as “a second sun, a jagged orange tongue licking the sky,” a conceit sustained with chilling control. The “national cake,” Shehu observes, is “baked in our backyard, yet the only part we receive / is the soot in our lungs.” “Fisherman’s Empty Net” sustains a funereal tone through a tight ballad-like structure, its ABAB couplets accumulating the weight of elegy: “His net returns with oil, not fish; / the river’s heart a poisoned wish.”
The Mokwa flood sequence (poems 31–37) represents Shehu’s most sustained engagement with the politics of infrastructure and state neglect. In “Mokwa Weeps,” the poet insists that “the rains are not to blame,” directing his indictment instead toward “the hands that felled the forests, / that paved floodplains with concrete greed, / that choked drains with refuse and neglect.”
This is not the anti-pastoral of Romantic disillusionment; it is forensic ecopoetics, a poetry that names culprits and demands accountability. The drowned speak in “The Drowned,” a remarkable prosopopoeia in which the two hundred-plus victims of the 2024 floods become choric witnesses: “We are the drowned, but not the gone. / Our voices ripple in the rain, a chorus for the living.” Shehu’s risk of ventriloquizing the dead is mitigated by the political precision of his accusation: the floods are “not by nature’s whim alone / but by the hands that failed to act.”
If the first movement traces a trajectory from silence to speech, and the second maps ecological devastation, the third (poems 20–30 and 38–39) assembles a gallery of labouring figures that constitutes a kind of counter-census of the Nigerian working class. “Toiling Bones” and “The Sun Chews Their Bones” are the most overtly polemical poems in the collection, their rhetoric sharpened to the edge of agitprop.
The latter opens with a personification of the sun as “a tyrant [that] gnaws their spines,” an image of cosmic hostility that Shehu extends to encompass the entire political economy: “Native-land your warmth is cruel, / a furnace fed by the worker’s fuel.”
Yet Shehu is at his best when he moves beyond generalised indictment toward the particular. “Stolen Dawn,” a portrait of a ten-year-old hawker, achieves a specificity that is devastating precisely because it resists sentimentality. The child’s inventory—”Buy gyada, buy zobo, buy pure water!”—becomes a litany of diminished possibility, and the detail of the Emir’s palace that “looms so grand / but casts no shade on her small hand” is a masterclass in imagistic compression.
“The Maid’s Silent Scream” and “Barren Scroll” extend this focus to the domestic worker and the unemployed graduate, figures whose invisibility in official discourse is mirrored by their marginal position within the national imaginary.
“Iron in the Marrow” (poem 30) is in many respects the collection’s most accomplished single poem. A sustained tribute to the Nigerian market woman, it deploys a free-verse line of extraordinary suppleness, moving from the domestic intimacy of the mortar’s “steady thud-thud that beats back the shadows” to the macroeconomic scale of “the men in the high towers of glass / debating the macro and the micro of the ruin.”
Shehu’s central metaphor—the woman as “silent cartographer of the kitchen, / mapping out how to stretch a mudu of garri / into a bridge that will carry five souls across the week”—achieves an intersection of domestic labour and national crisis that recalls the best work of the Caribbean poet M. NourbeSe Philip. The poem’s closing image of women who “held the sky up with a single tired shoulder” is a resonant tribute that earns its grandeur through the accumulated specificity of the lines that precede it.
The fourth movement (poems 40–62) extends the collection’s gaze to the formal political sphere, with uneven but often striking results. “Oath of Hollow Tongues” is an ambitious deconstruction of the national pledge that implicates not only the venal political class—”leaders with bellies swollen like gods”—but also a citizenry complicit in its own subjugation. “We curse the leaders,” Shehu writes, “but mirror their sins, / our silence a rope tightening around hope.” This willingness to indict the oppressed alongside the oppressor gives the collection a moral complexity that distinguishes it from more straightforward protest poetry.
“Poem for a Flag” (poem 57) is the collection’s most structurally ambitious political poem, a prosopopoeia in which the Nigerian flag itself becomes a speaking subject. The device risks bathos—one recalls the many failed personifications of national symbols in postcolonial verse—but Shehu controls it with assurance.
The flag’s memory of hope—”hoisted high in ’60, when hope was a river flowing free”—gives way to a litany of betrayals: “my green is mocked by barren lands, / where oil spills poison the Niger’s pulse.” Yet the poem refuses to settle into pure lament, pivoting instead toward a qualified optimism: “I am no mere cloth, no rag of regret. / I am the soul of a giant, chained yet fierce.
“A Land That Drinks Its Blood” (poem 56) is perhaps the collection’s most ambitious formal experiment: a polyphonic invocation of ancestral spirits from Nigeria’s four cardinal regions, each crying out against the nation’s self-immolation.
The Eastern ancestors invoke “Ọdịnani,” the Western elders call upon “Ṣàngó” and “Orunmila,” the Northern ancestors speak through Daurama, the legendary founder of the Hausa states, and the Delta ancestors mourn the desecration of their mangroves. The effect is incantatory, almost oratorio-like, and it demonstrates Shehu’s capacity to weave a distinctly Nigerian spiritual vocabulary into his contemporary political critique without lapsing into ethnographic display.
