Idanre and Other Poems
Published in 1967, the year the Biafran War began, this collection showcased the future Nobel laureate's (1986) full poetic range. The Yoruba mythological epic "Idanre" meditates on Ogun, god of iron and creativity, while the political poems reckon with Nigeria's civil war. Soyinka fuses modernist technique with Yoruba oral tradition to create a poetry that is both universal and irreducibly African.
Soyinka's syntax here is knotted to the point of barricade: inverted, compressed, dense with Yoruba cosmology he declines to gloss. The title poem demands footnotes or faith. This obscurity set off a real war in Nigerian letters, with the poet accused of writing African material in a borrowed modernist code, and the charge has never fully gone away.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
