'A Carnival of Looters' Tayo Olafioye

Tayo Olafioye is a prize-winning poet, and currently distinguished professor of literature in the US. A poet of the younger generation, his overriding concern is for the future of nationhood and national identity in Nigeria; and his own relationship to the nation as a committed poet writing in exile. The poet assumes that to love one's country is to be critical about its hateful history, disintegration and idiocies. He also asks: 'How do we carve a new nation?' The rulers - the looters - are neither satisfactory nor convincing. Instead, according to Olafioye's poetic manfesto, 'poetry must whittle new alternatives'."It is this kind of poetry which Pablo Neruda describes as imperfect... It is political. It is cultural, and beyond all this, it is an inner quest to conquer the turbulence of his world...Olafioye's book of poems...restates in concrete terms the blinding realities of Nigeria's post-independence social and political madness." - Onookome Okome