An Invitation to Mythopoetic Renewal

In Chijioke Amu Nnadi’s Eucalyptus, language surges as a living force of memory, ancestry, and ritual rebirth. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes 

This is one poetry collection that hits like a raging storm before the pages are even turned. Curiously, Chijioke Amu Nnadi’s Eucalyptus evokes the “rushing pinions [that] stir ocean to madness” in Sir Walter Scott’s “The Song of the Tempest”—words crashing, surging, gathering heat, while thick with the scent of eucalyptus, the presence of ancestors, and quiet, unrecorded miracles that insist on being felt rather than named. It bursts in with authority, announcing itself and taking up space.

Eighty-one poems surge together as a single continuum, less a neat collection than a sustained, living gathering. One voice rises, another answers. The work unfolds like a night-long assembly: elders speak, singers respond, the air heavy with wood smoke and wet earth. From the prefatory “heritage of words” to the closing movement of “of becoming poet”, the message is clear: poetry here is not ornamental. It is lived, carried, passed on—meant to be spoken aloud, not merely glanced at. In its opening line, “a poet writes: heritage of words,” the book stakes its claim: poetry is a sacred office, a conduit through which “the lines of the poet become divine,” and the book itself may serve as “a sublime totem and its sanctification.” This is no rhetorical flourish; it is the collection’s guiding principle. The page functions as a score, and parenthetical directions—(chants, with “oja,” “ogene,” “drums”…)—punctuate the text, insisting that the poems be voiced, echoed, inhabited.

Some of the poems are organised around names, each a portal into lineage, history, and memory. As an early homage to J.P. Clark, “bekederemo: the dark swallows everything, but light” establishes a pattern recurring throughout the book. Rivers dominate: a canoe bobbing on dark waters, a paddle dipping and “inseminating the aged dread,” ripples fleeing “as fallen leaves from the wandering wind of ill omen.” The river is both geographical and metaphysical, carrying the poet from departure to arrival, from the living to the ancestors. The refrain—“the dark swallows everything, but light”—returns like a mantra, steadying the movement from mourning to illumination.

The poem, “amu nnadi”, follows, a self-elegy situating the poet’s name alongside the hills of his ancestry: “the hills too are ancestors / whose spirit cannot be buried / who watch a pilgrim’s journey / across all undulations of time.” The hills become elders in quiet council, observing the pilgrim’s “purple passing / like a kid’s uncertain first steps seeking / succour, out of engorged udders of time.” The body is rendered with material precision—feet “painted black-brown, with the soot / of places, and soot of many black hearts”—as the poem realises the poet’s name serves as a “wall on which the minstrel leans / to renew his strength. And again / find the voice to sing the eulogies.”

Imagery gathers and intertwines throughout the collection. Rivers, hills, bodies, and ancestral presences fold into one another, forming a symbolic ecosystem where boundaries blur. At its most powerful, this layering creates a sustained imaginative intensity, drawing the reader into a living web of connections. At times, however, the accumulation can feel heavy, as the poems linger so insistently over their images that their impact softens.

Another poem, “igwebuike”, explores the Igbo concept of collective strength, linking it to the eucalyptus tree. Its “green tongue of its flowering” and “gospel of eucalyptus” pulse “with life.” Leaves offer “mint exhortation,” its oil a “salving balm of homilies” capable of “calm[ing] this long-held ache.” The eucalyptus becomes a symbol of communal resilience, a “sceptre in nsukka asadu’s ministerial awakening,” its branches “dialects of god,” oil flowing “to arouse the people into / communion.” Foreign imports are absorbed, indigenised, transformed into a source of healing for a wounded community.

Then comes “ogadagidi”, erupting with animal energy: “thunder is no match for the lion’s roars / nor lightning to your imperial laughter.” Storm, fire, and cloud fuse with the lion’s presence, whose “paws sail upon earth as you walk.” Chants and the sounds of “oja” and “ogene” carry the poem from roar to ritual, declaring that “a child has become a man, ogadagidi! / ogadagidi! Man too becomes an ancestor.” The lion bridges the living and the ancestral, purifying the land and ensuring “the riches of its land grow / like yam tendrils men rise to own trees.”

The collection segues through a roster of names and places, each poem adding a layer to the overall mosaic. There is “abena,” which adorns “the aso-ofi of a leopard”; a masquerade examines the courage required to wear the mask; “eriketa” and “tayira” extend personal invocations. Women and self-reflection turn inward, exploring gendered identity and artistic scrutiny. “abuja airport: departures and arrivals” situates poems in the capital, marking departure as a recurring motif. Places are not mere backdrop; they pulse with presence, shaping and reflecting the poems’ rhythms and themes: “bar beach, night” evokes Lagos, while “seneca rocks” and “oglebay park, west virginia” stretch the map to the United States, forming a diasporic axis. Jabi, dark and silvery waters, and lakes form a water-centred sequence, reinforcing the river as the book’s central image—a source of memory, a means of cleansing, and a boundary between worlds: “the body of water cannot be cleansed by fallen rain / whose face cannot mirror the moods of falling tears / holds two worlds apart, of departure and arrival.”

Loss runs persistently through the collection. “elegy for a brother lost to the questions of life” mourns a sibling, “burying mallam abba” records a funeral, and “a poet’s memorial of his country’s national day, or…” extends grief to the nation. Meanwhile,“country named after sorrow and “the anguished ode” deepen the sense that personal mourning is inseparable from collective trauma. The poems offer no tidy consolation; they dwell in sorrow, naming it, chanting it, carrying it.

Love appears in layered forms. “valentine’s day ash Wednesday,” “valentine’s gift,” and “valentine’s day eulogy” juxtapose celebration with penance, while “hugging you,” “i cannot hold you,” and “a lover’s introspections” explore intimacy as both presence and absence. In “i who am love,” love becomes identity itself, constitutive of the poet’s being even when the beloved is absent.

Language braids English and Igbo, with phrases such as “ihejuruonu n’adig ntagbute,” “nna chiri nwa eze,” and “igwurube oru miii” left untranslated, drawing the reader fully into the cultural circle. Repetition functions as incantation; refrains echo like drumbeats, long, unbroken lines mimic breath and river flow, and tactile imagery—soil, ash, dust, rain, stone—grounds the abstract in elemental reality.

At the thematic centre stands “eucalyptus,” reclaiming a colonial import as a native symbol. Leaves, oil, and branches provide “mint exhortation,” “salving balm of homilies,” and “dialects of god,” linking healing, communal strength, and continuity. The tree embodies igwebuike: many branches, one trunk, sustaining and sheltering the community.

The collection’s scale and oratorical pitch demand sustained attention. Lines stretch without end-stops, and the repetition of chants, rivers, and names shapes a ritual space where time slows and personal and collective memory blur. Closing poems—“requiem,” “no sadder lie told of season,” “the anguished ode,” and of becoming poet—offer no tidy resolution, leaving the sense that poetry is ongoing, the poet’s duty persistent, the lamp of verse kept alight.

Amu Nnadi’s achievement is monumental: intimate yet epic, lyrical yet thunderous, local yet universal. Eucalyptus insists on full immersion into its rhythms, names, rivers, and fires. Poetry here is inhabited, performed, lived—a torrent reshaping everything it touches. It is ceremonial, visionary, mythopoetic: a work where ancestry, nature, and divination intertwine, and the ordinary is transformed into the sacred.