ISBN | 9789956616589 |
Pages | 132 |
Dimensions | 203 x 127 mm |
Published | 2010 |
Publisher | Langaa RPCIG, Cameroon |
Format | Paperback |
Homage and Courtship
by Shadrach Ambanasom
Reviews
"Here is a collection of sixty-two beautifully crafted poems on some of the deepest of human emotions. They celebrate love, constancy, beauty, marriage, birth and death; in the poems are hailed intellectual labour, leadership and duty. Occasionally, the poet depicts the states of his mind against the backdrop of nature, interfusing description, memory and meditation in a manner essentially romantic. The best in Ambanasom's poetry is matter and manner combined. The striking force of the poems lies in the intriguing relationship between romanticism and romance. Ambanasom's romanticism is concerned with the concept of nature as a universal being or a cosmic entity, nostalgia, the attempt to link his childhood with the present and the future, and the response to nature at different levels of his development. The poet also demonstrates a penchant for rural subject matter, places and people. In the poet of romance there is a more direct expression of basic human emotions, in particular of love that is enchanting, possessing, seductive, and alluring. We find in the poems, love that is reciprocal and imbued with constancy and understanding."
“Ambanasom inserts the appropriate word for the appropriate emotion, using images to clothe his thought, images assembled from things actually seen and intimately known. His poetry achieves music and rhythm through diction, alliteration, repetition, assonance and the rhythmic cadence of the structure of some of the poems. This, to my mind, constitutes its forte.”