Labyrinths with Path of Thunder
Nigeria's greatest poet, killed at 35 fighting in the Biafran War, left a body of work of extraordinary density and beauty. The poems are simultaneously modernist, rooted in Igbo mythology, and prophetically political. "Path of Thunder" was written just before his death as a kind of premonition. Chinua Achebe called him the finest African poet of his generation. The Labyrinths sequence draws on ritual, Western classical literature, and African oral tradition in equal measure.
Okigbo wrote for poets, by his own account, and it shows: the sequences braid Igbo ritual with Pound and Eliot so tightly that, without notes, you are often admiring sound alone. Whole passages stay private code. The music is real and so is the difficulty; admiring this book and actually reading it are different commitments.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
