Unbinding the Fire This Time

Poised to arrive without ceremony yet charged with prophetic urgency, James Eze’s latest poetry collection transforms its April 3 release into a confrontation with a nation’s grief and a refusal of silence. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes 

No ceremony will herald the April 3—Good Friday—release of James Eze’s Unbind Me Now. No unveiling. No ribbon-cutting. No audience clinking glasses. Though the poet, journalist, and communications specialist considers the day “perfect” for unveiling such a collection, it will be released quietly, announced by press release—and that restraint carries its own weight. “Christ was nailed to the cross on that day to fulfil a prophecy—the prophecy of Jonah,” he muses, invoking the shadow in which Jonah’s three days in the belly of the fish foreshadow Christ’s three days in the tomb. Darkness before revelation. Stillness before illumination.

Against this backdrop, the poet steps forward as seer—bearing, in the stretch of his vocabulary, the anguish of his people. Cross and page slip into a wordless exchange, a silent call-and-response playing out beneath the currents of history and daily life. Sacrifice finds its echo in utterance; suffering turns to speech. Masobe Books, with its instinct for voices that trouble the living conscience, proves an apt midwife, ushering forth a collection that does not so much manifest as assert its presence.

Viewed through a deeper spiritual lens, the day called “Good Friday” is more than commemoration; it is admonition. Humanity, confronted with Truth over two millennia ago, failed to recognise It, and in that failure set in motion consequences no ritual or act of piety could annul. In this light, Unbind Me Now reads less as commentary than as mirror: a register of human error, echoing the same refusal to heed what is clear, just, and life-preserving.

Yet the timing is no accident. The book enters the world under the long shadow of that ominous day, bearing the weight of history and the urgency of reckoning. The poet as witness—chronicler of grief, injustice, and absence—threads through these pages with unflinching clarity, a precision that shapes not only what the poems convey but the very texture of their language.

Eze does not merely assemble poems; he conjures them. They arrive in waves—incantatory, insistent—charged with a heat that defies restraint. From the Okigbo epigraph, already taut with sacrificial tension, the collection stakes its allegiance. Fire is everywhere: not merely motif but medium of utterance—temperament, argument, method. In “burning bush,” the opening sequence, flame is both revelation and rebuke. The poems crackle with urgency, their cadences pitched between sermon and street chant. Eze’s voice does not falter—he names, he accuses, he refuses the anaesthetic of silence. “They have set fire to the wind,” he writes, and the line lands with the force of something both impossible and undeniable.

Under the shadow of that Crucifixion commemoration day, the imagery cuts even deeper. This is a world that does not merely suffer but colludes in its own undoing—a world that crucifies, again and again, what might redeem it. The wounded landscapes—skies that grieve, rivers that retreat, a sun dimmed by injustice—are not ornamental but revelatory, tracing a deeper disorder governed by an inviolable law, where consequence is neither arbitrary nor delayed but earned.

What sustains the collection is its modulation. The blaze never holds at fever pitch. In “slow burn”, the temperature dips, revealing anger in subtler forms—the way it settles into bone, the way it sharpens rather than fades. The poems turn inward, less declarative, more probing. By “silent ember”, the voice lowers to a murmur, yet it is a dangerous hush, thick with unresolved questions. Here, public catastrophe becomes private reckoning. The poet turns on the self, on faith, on the tenuous distance between divine promise and human wreckage—questions that recall the often-ignored demand for personal responsibility within a lawful moral order.

Eze is most persuasive when his imagery is rooted in the sensory and physically tangible. The drums of “divination time”, the harmattan’s dry breath, the baobab’s endurance—these anchor the work, giving body to its reach. Without them, abstractions like “malignant clouds” and “implacable ears” risk drifting. With them, the poems gain weight and density, resisting easy generalisation while pulling the reader into a fully lived world.

Still, the collection thrives on excess. Images pile up; metaphors buckle under their own weight. Volcanoes labour, rivers walk away, skies fracture into grief. At times, it overwhelms, as if the poet, armed with a vocabulary equal to his outrage, cannot spare a single line. A stricter hand might have let the fiercest phrases breathe. Yet this very excess is the collection’s pulse. It surges, spills, refuses restraint—mirroring the chaos it confronts.

Its political core is unmistakable. In poems such as “burning flag,” “burnt bibles,” and “unknown gunmen,” the nation appears as both stage and casualty. Violence is named plainly, yet lifted into a mythic dimension where the land itself recoils and remembers. Nigeria is no mere geography; it is a sentient presence, trembling under the weight of its contradictions.

As the collection unfolds, another shift occurs. The tenderness of fire ushers a quieter tone—questions of identity, belonging, and fractured selfhood. The blaze softens into warmth. In “the hush we once lived in”, the COVID-19 pandemic is evoked with restraint: emptied streets, suspended time, a world holding its breath. By “to a grieving earth”, the lens widens again. The poems take on ecological urgency, mourning a planet worn thin. The anger remains, but it carries an elegiac undertone.

If the collection falters, it does so through insistence. Fire, above all, is worked so relentlessly that its edge sometimes dulls. Rhetoric circles back. Yet even here, the work is steadied by conviction. Eze believes in the necessity of his voice, and that belief sustains the reading experience.

What lingers is not a line but a sensation—having stood too close to something volatile, unresolved. Unbind Me Now resists polish. It chooses witness. It chooses rupture. It speaks where silence might suffice. Released on a day that is both exhortation and reckoning—a reminder of humanity’s failure before Truth and the consequences that follow—the collection reads like an echo of the oft-repeated pattern: the seer proclaims, the world defies, and the fire, once lit, runs its course.