How Scary the Growls of a Motorcycle – A Review of Ogaga Ifowodo’s 2026 Collection
Updated: 6 hours ago
Ogaga Ifowodo, Why Does God Need a Gun £10.49 (Amazon UK), Published by Masobe Books, 2026
ISBN 9788570151
Bridgette James fiercely combats the assertion: There are no gems in Ogaga Ifowodo's shortlisted collection.
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Following a review of Why Does God Need a Gun published in a literary outlet recently, a reader’s understanding of Ogaga Ifowodo's work needs to be hastily resynthesized into what is at its core — a book that deserves a spot on the 2026 Nigeria Prize for Literature short list.
I have two things to my credit- authenticity and a lifetime reading Nigerian poetry. My late dad Modupe raised me on the works of Wole Soyinka and Christpher Okogbo. I spotted glaring similarities to the works of our acclaimed poets; the moment I scanned Ogaga Ifowodo’s work. The early poems remind me of Soyinka’s lament in Idanre & Other Poems (Hill and Wang, 1967). Ogaga Ifowodo’s god is reminiscent of Ogun, the ferocious deity in ‘deluge’ by Soyinka in the cited work.
To be death and not life
to destroy all that He made—
tell me, why would God need a gun?
—Source: ‘Why Does God Need a Gun? Page 38
What does the other reviewer mean by an absence of poetry? What does his use of the clichéd expression, ‘poetic gems’ even mean?
While the Poetry Foundation puts forward a working definition of a poem as piece of writing which tells a story or uses elegy or literary devices or figurative language such as metaphors what constitutes poetic expression is subjectively and culturally interpreted.
The collection is sympathetic to women and begins by introducing us to a protagonist: a girl called Leah. The register belongs to a child, so it works. One cannot dismiss it as a simplistic piece because it reflects how a real Nigerian child might speak. She materialises again in poem eight and on page fifty-eight where she writes a letter to her dad. Who else is the female in ‘Keeping Her Clothes Clean’ on page seventy? I would let you go read the collection and come back and have a natter with me, as we say in London.
Once a month, she gathers her stolen
daughter’s clothes, still fragment unworn,
and washes them in a foaming bucket
Leah – who life is impacted by the atrocities of Islamic is eerily similar to the minors I encounter in Rasaq Malik Gbolahan’s The Origin of Wounds (Anhinga press, 2025). I was fortunate to have devoured Gbolahan’s work first, as it aptly prepared me for Ifowodo's female victims.
How day changes its colours, light rays scattered and dulled too quickly. / How silent the night, how scary the growls of a motorcycle. (‘The Forest is My New School;’ Ogaga Ifowodo.)
How a collection should be reviewed is not set in stone, but there is an expectation this side of the pond, that some tangential reference is made to other writers similar or dissimilar to the one being reviewed or contemporaneous works from the author’s home country.
“Poetry as a text is forever engaging in conversation with other works which might have influenced that author and hence stylistically, Ogaga Ifowodo's love for literary devices and an inquisitorial-type poem can be compared to the features of the work of my long-term friend: Oumar Farouk Sesay.
To get a feel of his poems, I read some of Ifowodo’s stanzas aloud once at least. I bore in mind that the poet must have ‘laboured’ to compile a collection therefore I endeavoured to respect that. From my interactions with readers from Nigeria (and West Africa), a high number of those who read a book review may never ever read the book itself that is being reviewed. We need to be cognisant of the fact that a review can’t just be a formal representation of a whinge but for sections of our readership a replacement of the actual/physical product due to the cost of books. My eureka moment came when a Nigerian lady commented under a book club video I posted in 2022: [h]ow much do you charge for book reviews ma? Let me at once, clear my throat and declare over a Tanoy, that my main source of income is my Met-Inspector-Ex-Husband’s salary, not reviews.
A reader’s expectations affect a review. I attend Poetry Society Stanzas and other reading groups in England. We have one golden rule: Do Not Rubbish a Published Text Chosen by Another Editor.
Language
A poem should not be confined in a box that's missing the readability key. Many of the contemporary and classic poems I try to present in an audiovisual format fall flat on their faces because the West African reader scrolling through a social media feed while navigating life in a figurative Keke or bus, does not understand the poems’ hidden meanings.
A poem is – at a minimum – a piece that strategically arranged lexical items to convey meaning.
“Dense poetry for some young readers in African countries my project targets, is like a faucet without a tap handle and so they approach metaphorical poetry with scepticism.
— B. James
Albeit Ifowodo's poems move a reader from the superficial layer of language into the metaphorical one. Thankfully, in this collection, metaphorical phrases such as ‘the wind in the fly’s wing’ or ‘measure the pulse of yesterday, ‘aren’t my/a pretentious village-uncle, they dot the poems here and there and allow the reader to carry on er, with the task of comprehending the bulk of the text.
Musicality
The term is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as the skill and understanding in performing music. Poets make music. To be genre-specific, London-based Poet: Oluwaseun Olayiwola says in the 2026 summer edition of the Poetry Reviews, ‘A poet’s music is a mixture of things: diction, white space, typographic eclecticisms, prosody and of course, syntax.’
Anaphora and other forms of repetition, sonic literary devices (alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia), half rhymes and the occasional full rhyme etcetera, create a melodic rhythm in a good number of poems in the book.
Like light on leaves in the dead of the night,
Like limbs surprised into dance by song
Like God planting his Word on yam mound.
The repetition of the /l/ lateral approximant mixed with the /oh/ vowel sound is quite musical.
I can point out a good few of another contender for the prize – Rasaq Malik's work –where a handful of these sonic features are also present.
“Clarity can never not win over a judging panel. Year in year out, one sees how 'poems ordinary Joe can understand' win the National Poetry Competition.
Which editor doesn't tut, reading a submission thinking, why's that chunky word there?'
Takeaway point: Ogaga Ifowodo's work has one advantage: clarity.
Audience & Targeted Reading Age
If the target destination of Why Does Your God Need a Gun is the pedagogical bus depot, then it works. A teenage Literature student would not struggle to do an analysis of these poems.
Any poetry collection that appeals to every reader is a never-was-published collection. Poetry readers are like customers at a car show room. Yes please. Miss Smith will have a Sonnet Rolls-Royce but no thank you, Miss Bloggs doesn't want to be spotted in a Free-verse Mercedes.
What links the poems in the collection?
I attended a workshop here once and my virtual gob fell open, hearing the tangential aspects that British poets use to create a systematic flow from one poem to the next. Pictures, repeated words/nouns like molecule, matter, blood, God, protagonists and sub-themes somehow help separate and/or transition a number of the poems in Why Does God Need a Gun.
Multi-sensory Imagery
There are several types employed in the text-under-discussion: visual, tactile, gustatory, auditory, olfactory, kinaesthetic, and organic imagery.
Examples-
If the mild morning air catches fire = visual
By thunderbolt; guns and bombs; the weeping I hear = auditory
Bees are making honey = gustatory
Something popped inside me (slightly organic; more auditory)
Regarding the lack of originality and imagination, though I wanted to explore fragments of the poet’s imagination a bit more, I was particularly enamoured with the closing poem which is tercet (a poem laid out in three-line stanzas).
the colour of what flows in our veins,
but very soon run out of oxygen,
and unmake the molecules of our blood.
{Page: 110-111}
A visually imaginative piece is the poem on page one hundred in my UK-bought edition, which I think (loosely) reimagines the creation story and allows a female to take centre-stage:
Made whole from a borrowed bone
full head of hair, vulva and womb,
goblets all men must drink to live,
nursing with the bone tied to her neck,
cradling with the bone stuck in her throat
What is that bone? I leave that to your imagination….
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