The Harmony of Lost Things by Ndubuisi Martins

Ndubuisi Martins’ poems have a Soyinka influence. The poem “Answers from the Bramble” sings like the latter’s “Abiku.” In his wonderful gazelle The Harmony of Lost Things, Martins courts the tradition of a generation of Nigerian poetry that is effacing. He is mostly polemical and wants to cause a revolution; the struggle is still the struggle to him, thus, he charges, “Let the wind / Let the pipe / Let the windpipe come . . .” But he doesn’t forget to grieve, too, this thing that makes us human, as we find in the eponymous poem, “The Harmony of Lost Things.”