Etches on Fresh Waters

Etches on Fresh Waters is a creative liaison between two poets: Toyin Falola, a historian of international repute and quintessentially prolific writer, who has already published a collection of poetry, Scoundrels of Deferral, and Adérónké Adésànyà, an artist and art historian, who hitherto wrote without the intent to publish and is cutting her first teeth in poetry with this outstanding book. The poetic cosmos of Falola engages the poetic universe of Adésànyà to give the literary world a phenomenal book of poetry that promises to generate debate for years to come.

The poetic journey of Etches on Fresh Waters straddles spaces and epochs, and ties truth, laughter, joy and sadness, victory and failure, hope and despair to the apron of time. The frailty, docility, fragility and volatility of human life find space in the rapidity of a poetic train. This publication is a welcome feast to lovers of the rich craft of poetry. Words are reinvented and crafted in lucid, zesty, and breathtakingly thought-provoking lines.

This volume covers a span of 25 to 50 years in the authors' professional range and observations of various societies and peoples, and contains over a hundred poems and numerous illustrations. Divided thematically, the collection seeks to provide moments of wisdom, words of solace, songs of abuse, songs of praise, songs of politics, songs of morality, songs of desire, and songs of labor, while theorizing in a subtle manner, on the value of foresight as opposed to hindsight, hard work in contrast to laziness, friendship instead of hatred, openness as an alternative to close-mindedness, intelligence as opposed to foolishness, and ultimately, on the imperative of love in many shades and textures as opposed to hatred and hypocrisy.

"[T]he genius of a new and compelling African poetic voice… The beauty of the poems in Etches on Fresh Waters lies in their multiplicity of meanings and transcendence. When considered as an oeuvre of initiation, the energy they radiate can only come from the labyrinth of millennial musings in their multivocality and multidirectionality." — Niyi Afolabi, literary critic and essayist

"[M]etaphor has now reached its most eccentric moment… the center of patriarchy has crumbled, and the logic of an entire society has been demolished… Is there a revolution in the making?" — Jane Rochbart, poet and columnist

"[A] richness that defines the soulful vignettes and layers of emotional and passionate human motions." — Anthony Agbali, poet and priest

"This book should be placed neatly and squarely on everybody's coffee table." — Ikhide R. Ikheloa