Kennedy Adewale is a poet and artistic photographer whose work captures authentic moments of human connection.

He seeks the ‘pulse’ in everyday interactions, focusing on spontaneous expressions and gestures that reveal our shared experience.

Though not dated, his collection, Echoes Of The Red Earth: A Definitive Collection, unveils a poetry that is evocative and impressive: Its very rich tapestry is embellished with a bittersweet tone.

The subject matter of this collection ranges from alienation, domestic life and, unsurprisingly issues that are rich with humour.

Organised into seven sections or thematic groupings, Unbroken Rhythms: A Song for the Diaspora, Where the Harmattan Whispers, Indigo Horizons and Golden Grass, Concrete Sunsets and Copper Dust, The Empty Cup, The Asphalt Heartbeat of Lagos and Bloodlines of the Savannah, the collection uses vivid imagery to convey deep, spiritual connection to the land, environment and tradition. The imagery are condensed and they run all through the collection, which makes a person who does not like poetry to read it.

The first section contains five poems and one other poem that could be called title poem. The title poem, so, it seems, provides inroad to understanding other poems.

In Unbroken Rhythms: A Song For The Diaspora, the title poem, he looks at the issue of alienation. The poet takes a journey across the Atlantic and back. But the experience beats like the heart and refuses to be silenced by distance, time, or tide.

Through his eyes and ears, the reader gets a strong sense of fear and hope. This poem, which is not to be sung, uses symbols and metaphor to create effect on the readers. It reflects as it flows like water, moving in time.
The six-line poem is written in free verse, which allows the speaker to hear pain everywhere in that journey through the Atlantic.

Carried on salt-spray, far from the earth that was warm.

Though the soil changed from red clay to grey stone,
The sap in our veins remains stubbornly our own.

The use of ‘storm and salt-spray’ metaphorically evokes experience of the Middle Passage or forced migration. While Being “seeds spat out by the mouth of a storm” suggests a violent displacement from a “warm earth” (Africa) to a colder, harder environment.

The baobab tree is personified as a homeland that ‘does not cry’, accepting the harsh ‘gales’ of history. He also uses ‘red clay to grey stone’ to highlight the shift from the fertile African soil to urban, industrial landscapes of the West replete with ‘stone’ and ‘concrete’.

The poet says even though the surroundings have changed, the internal identity and heritage remain ‘stubbornly our own’.

The Baobab does not cry when the gale strips its boughs,

It knows the fruit must travel where the wild spirit allows.

We were seeds spat out by the mouth of a storm
The tone is a mixed brew of melancholy and hope described as ‘Double Consciousness’ often felt by the diaspora.

‘Double consciousness’, coined by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1903, is the psychological challenge marginalised people face navigating a dominant, oppressive society. It is a sense of “two-ness”—simultaneously seeing oneself through one’s own eyes and through the prejudiced, demeaning eyes of the dominant culture.

In this first section, the poet also talks about alienation in some of the poems such as The Seed in the Wind, which interrogates scattering of people like Jews in Babylon; Roots in Deep Water, finding home in the middle of the ocean; The Tongue Remembered – Reclaiming the languages we almost lost; Market Day in a Foreign Land – The struggle to find the scent of home and The Return, which seeks the loss Africa.

The same five poems and one title poem is deployed in Where the Harmattan Whispers. This section is warm, accessible and never wantonly oblique, but deep beyond measure. It contains many moments of pure beauty, such as the titular poem, which truly says everything with very little.

The poet journeys through The Ghost of the North, The Red Earth’s Veil, Morning Tea & Cracked Lips, Ancestors in the Haze and The Final Bloom.

Each poem is an experience in human memory. It is a time of reflection where the vibrant colours of the tropics are muted by the desert’s touch.

In The Ghost of the North, the poet describes arrival of the Harmattan (or a similar extreme dry season/desert wind) in the North.

It uses imagery to personify the dry, dusty, and hot winds from the Sahara Desert as a “dry king” that dominates the environment. The poem evokes a feeling of being at the mercy of nature’s forces, highlighting the challenges of the Sahelian climate.

He personifies the harmattan, saying, as a ‘grey ghost, stealing the green from the leaf,’ and metaphor in ‘Whistling through the zinc roofs of Kano.’

“The Sahara breathes, and we tremble”: Represents the desert wind coming south, signaling a time of intense dryness that causes anxiety among the people.

Another evocative and powerful piece of poetry is The Drum in the Dust. It paints a vivid picture of a communal, rhythmic dance deeply connected to the land and tradition. The poem describes a celebratory, communal dance that acts as a spiritual bridge connecting the people to their land and ancestors.
‘The earth is a drum, and our feet are the mallets.’

This opening metaphor establishes a direct, percussive connection between the dancers and the ground, suggesting that the movement is creating the rhythm.

This collection, no doubts, is an intense expression of human life—and at its fullest. However, the style deployed is somehow flawed. The poet does use any variation just the straightforward arrangement, which makes it monotonous.

• This is a critic view of this collection of poetry