Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma (review)

Reviewed by: Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature by Nathan Suhr-Sytsma Catherine Waithera Mwangi Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature BY NATHAN SUHR-SYTSMA Cambridge UP, 2017. xi + 287 pp. ISBN 9781107166844 cloth. Poetry, Print, and the Making of Postcolonial Literature examines the roles of cultural institutions and print circulation in the development of Anglophone poetry during the era of decolonization. The first half of the book, constituted of two chapters and two interchapters, concentrates on the "geographic expansion of anglophone poetry aimed at restricted publics" (28) during the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. This poetry targeted at "teachers, fellow poets, editors" (24) prioritized excellence and had no extra-literary agenda. Chapter one and the subsequent interchapter highlight the roles of university literary circles and local institutions in the emergence of J. P. Clarke, Christopher Okigbo, and Seamus Heaney as accomplished and celebrated modernist poets. Building on Pascale Casonova's concept of "literary Greenwich Meridian" (35) through the idea of "provincializing the Greenwich Meridian" (31), Nathan Suhr-Sytsma argues that these provincial non-English poets were published by local and metropolitan publishers because they adopted English, modified the "outdated idiom of the poetry that they studied in school and university into the up-to-date idiom of new poetry" (35), and also drew on local traditions, settings, and experiences. He analyzes poems in the Ibadan student magazine The Horn to show how the Nigerian poets imitated Anglophone modernist poets learned at the colonial University College, Ibadan (UCI), and their poems in the Ibadan-based journal Black Orpheus as well others published by the Ibadan-based Mbari Publications to show how they incorporated indigenous, exotic, traditional, and modern aesthetics. Suhr-Sytsma also analyzes Heaney's poems in the Belfast student magazines Gorgon and Q to show how they address rural life in the style of British poets and those in Interest and the London-based weekly New Statesman to reveal how they are influenced not just by contemporary British poetry but also by the Belfast Group. Chapter two and the subsequent interchapter examine the role of the Commonwealth Arts Festival and its surrounding publications in the expansion of Commonwealth verse and poetry in Britain from 1965 to 1968. In chapter two, it is argued that the 1965 Commonwealth Arts Festival changed the metropolitan perception of English-language poetry as a field of select British and American poets, thus enabling nonmetropolitan poets to not only "participate in the same literary world and same literary time as those in the metropole" (76) but also to address local and metropolitan publics as well as "a 'Commonwealth public' generated by the Festival" (76). Suhr-Sytsma analyzes poems by poets from Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Caribbean, Nigeria, and Northern Ireland, who were presented at the events, revealing how they fuse postcolonial national identity and Commonwealth literary tradition. He also analyzes Nigerian Commonwealth poetry in the anthology Young Commonwealth Poets '65 that emanated from the conference held in Cardiff, revealing how it addresses Nigeria's landscape [End Page 201] and traditions in verse forms that are rare in English poetry. The subsequent interchapter argues that the London Magazine attracted nonmetropolitan poets since it prioritized the aesthetic quality of poems over the nationalities of the poets. The poem "Dogstar" in the special issue of September 1965 is analyzed to show how Derek Walcott "renovates midcentury formalism, shaping his poems to scenes—and words—unknown in the British tradition" (119). The second half of the book highlights the public significance of poetry during the political crisis in Nigeria and Northern Ireland in the mid- to late 1960s. Poetry is perceived to have an extra-literary agenda, to be a medium through which to lament and understand social upheaval, and targeted at "publics beyond those of the literary world" (29). Chapter three, which analyzes Okigbo's "Lament of the Drums" in Transition, Path of Thunder, and "Lament of the Deer" in How the Leopard Got His Claws, shows that he reached these audiences by constructing himself as "a modern, nationally oriented Nigerian intellectual" (124). The subsequent interchapter focuses on James Simmons and the Honest Ulsterman, examining how they were influenced by his stay...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.