This collection is a debut – it is also an ending. The poet Gboyega Odubanjo died tragically almost a year ago and the final edit of this extraordinary and arresting book has been overseen by friends, family and his publishers. It is, in one sense, a found poem – or series of poems – about something not a soul would ever wish to find. On 21 September 2001 – anyone alive at that time will remember it – the headless torso of a boy was discovered in the Thames, in the stretch near the Globe theatre, dressed in a pair of orange girls’ shorts. It was police officers who gave him the name of Adam. And although detectives went on to discover that he had been brutally dismembered in a ritual sacrifice – perhaps to win a business deal or secure good luck – the murderer was never confirmed and the case never closed.
Odubanjo’s book takes Adam as his starting point and the name itself becomes a promise, a provocation, a vehicle for his ideas. Adam is old and new and black, and Odubanjo has produced a powerful and calculatedly distorted version of Genesis, mixed in with Yoruba culture. He describes an Eden too compromised to allow the familiar story root room. His creation myth lurches forward as he proves here, and elsewhere, that he is a master at allowing anguish and comedy to share the same space. In the newly created landscape, Odubanjo folds in an underground map (he was born and raised in east London):
… give man sea and sky and trees
and zones one to six on the oyster so man can see it
now man said rah swear down
man said show me
It is that final imperative – “show me” – that feels especially dangerous; you sense in it a threshold, the likelihood of disaster about to be exhibited, a world gone awry. That apprehension of danger is a defining characteristic in this poetry.
Water has exceptional presence here and the uninterruptedly lower-case writing feels almost tidal. Although it is equally true that in poems such as Breaking there is a deliberate fragmentation, as if language itself could not escape assault. Odubanjo warns that people overlook water at their peril. In Rewilding they convince themselves water does not exist. But they should heed Odubanjo’s opening line:
it was the rainy season so it rained
I love the teasing obviousness of this – it makes you settle instantly, knowing you are in the hands of a born storyteller. It is a collection filled with unexpected leaps of imagination, such as the strange and affecting poem Bronze Adam of Benin, in which Odubanjo pictures the dead boy’s father creating a bronze bust in his memory. I enjoyed, too, the serious yet entertaining Against Resting in Peace, a wry reeling off of the futility of being asked to do the right thing (from deleting social media to supporting independent bookshops) when good behaviour guarantees nothing and death turns out to be the destination.
But it is the long poem You: The Many Adams of Adam that is the most ambitious, a poem of collective loss. The entire book is in part about what it is to be a missing person – and it seems an unprocessable tragedy to learn that Odubanjo himself at the end of his life went missing and was discovered to have accidentally drowned in a lake. The Gboyega Odubanjo Foundation has been set up to support low-income black writers and honour him.
Adam by Gboyega Odubanjo is published by Faber (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Breaking
looks like it’ll be a rainy week ahead thank you now the
body
of an unidentified boy aged between four and seven
was in the river for up to ten days before a passer by
noticed african boy’s stomach included extracts
of calabar bean and flecks of gold expert at kew gardens
says headless limbless boy likely to be Nigerian
growing number have spread throughout the world coming
up
goat arrested for armed robbery prime minister’s response
breaking
male torso boy five or six said to be somebody’s
son boy assigned most appropriate acceptable name
after long deliberation thought to have been in river ten
days
appeal made to family of girls’ shorts boy’s body
walking man who spotted adam to be offered counselling
suspicious thames river boy behaviour should be reported
to authorities in other news