Mark Nwagwu is a multi-talented 88-year-old professor of cell and molecular biology. He has 12 books to his credit, including four poetry collections that were dedicated to his dear late wife, Professor Helen Onyemazuwa Nwagwu. Prof, a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science and Association of Nigerian Authors, is currently (and amazingly, given his age!) a Ph.D student in the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan.
I was privileged to attend the launch of Prof’s latest poetry collection, CURVED FORTUNES, last weekend in Lagos; and I thought I should share some of the erudite reviewer Eriata Oribhabor’s thought-provoking insights with Vanguard readers.
A SYNOPSIS
Curved Fortunes is a collection of poems that explore the author’s interpretation of artworks and metaphorical evaluation of social issues. Immersed in philosophical thoughts, the author addresses topics related to destiny, love, loss, history and nationhood.
The author’s rich poetic tone spreads across the 110-page poetry collection, which features 89 poems, emphasising the author’s recurring fascination with fate and life through animate and inanimate objects.
Curved Fortunes is a reinforcement of Mark Nwagwu’s curiosity about life and the elevation of poetry as a language of introspective expressions: “dedicated to Christopher Nonyelum Okeke, a diplomat, for his support of the arts and his publication of “Contemporary Art: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art” whose images and pages inspired much of (my poems) – poems” in the collection.
This Review mirrors the Intersection of Philosophical and Metaphorical Strands in Mark Nwagwu’s Curved Fortunes and begins with the following questions:
What does one make of a poet who sings like an oracle and writes like a river? Who bends language not out of weariness but from a wild enduring yearning, to grasp the marrow of existence? In Curved Fortunes, Mark Nwagwu does not offer us a book of poems; he offers a metaphysical storm clothed in lyricism a love letter to life and loss, an elegy to a nation, a canvas of cosmic questions and, above all, a long, unflinching stare into the soul of being. In the words of Kolade Olanrewaju Freedom, Poet and author of Punctured Silence, “Curved Fortunes is a poet’s genuine interrogation of existence across the minute and profound, via lush lyricism. Similarly, and bordering on themes of love, philosophy and Lyricism, Femi Morgan, author of The Year of Five, says the following of Curved Fortunes – A volume rich in selfless rhetoric of love, rich in reflections of philosophy and mysteries that suffice from the depth of intricate human connections. Lyrical, resilient, and transformative”.
The cradle of this collection is no ordinary one. It book opens with the declaration, “I Was Born an Artist,” a sacred invocation, a declaration, a prophecy, wrapped in ancestral fabric. At its most accessible level, this poem is a maternal soliloquy; part prayer, part prophecy, delivered by a speaker on the brink of bringing life into the world. But this is no ordinary baby, not an ordinary mother. The opening lines are terse, raw, and resolute:
“I will live…
this pregnancy will not kill me
this child will live to be born”
Embedded in these lines, is a storm, a defiance against mortality and misfortune. The poet immediately sets the stakes high; that birth is not a given; but a battle. And not just for survival, but for destiny. The poem wrestles with the terrifying possibility that this child, so full of potential, might disappear into the vast sea of life without recognition:
“…what will this child be, if he flows into shoreless oceans
and be perpetually lost, his gems untold?” – perhaps the emotional and philosophical heart of the poem. The artist is born with gifts; nuggets of wisdom, giant emeralds, but there’s no guarantee that these will be seen, heard, or understood. Here, Nwagwu laments the artist’s fate in a society that often buries geniuses in shallow graves. And yet, he rebels against erasure, invoking ancestral protection: “mbakwa, ughumkwa, eme ye eme, nakbu alusi”. This Igbo exclamation is not decorative. It is a ritual defiance. “Mbakwa!” God forbid! This loss must not happen. The speaker calls on tutelary spirits (alusi) to ensure that the child’s story will not be swallowed by obscurity. This is more than maternal anxiety; it is existential outrage.
What animates the collection most vividly is love, not the kind that compels its host to offer gentle kisses on golden evenings, but a possession that culminates in reckless surrender. In “Write me a poem,” the poet says in a tone one might mistake for command, until one realises it is actually capitulation. Love here is not mere romance. It is longing ritualised, memory deified. In “You Have Captured Me,” love is a force that seizes the artist, renders him restless: “…possesses me, enters my heart / flows in my veins, traverses my being…” This is not just a sentimental expression, but spiritual devotion, intense as prophecy and tender as a whisper from beyond the veil. Nwagwu’s women, Anyanwu, Miraimisa, and Ojiego are not just muses. They are deities, dancers, revolutionaries, and memory-keepers. In “Her Memory,” he writes, “her memory marvels, serenades streaming skies,” gifting us a vision of remembrance that is not passive, but active, majestic, and luminous. These poems do not simply remember; they resurrect.
Then there is the gnawing tug of existence, the poet’s constant interrogation of being and the spaces between. What is art, what is self, what is the meaning of living in a world where “rainbows are still seeking elections” and the very air may vanish? In one breath, we are with shepherds in Eden; in another, we are duelling faceless ideologies. On “Boxing Day,” a day reimagined not for sport, but for existential battle, he says: “how do I know my enemy / if I cannot enter his mind / and flush out its insidious infidels?” That is the genius of Nwagwu’s poetry. It poses ancient questions in contemporary idioms, merging Biblical cadence with post-colonial critique, philosophical musing with lyrical fury.
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