Book review: Zenah Nakanwagi's poetry book is a triumph of love

“A woman is a thousand chambered heart that

beats for the world,

A woman is a hand that

holds the world before it falls,

A woman is the head that carries the world

when no one is there to make it cross…”

These couplets, or pairs of consecutive lines of poetry, create complete thoughts, in and of themselves. However, they follow an uneven syllable count with the structured unruliness that often defines “free verse”.

The first line has 15 syllables, the second 12 and the third 19.

Syllables are a unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, eg. Woman has two syllables (wom-an).

The number and use of syllables render the unit of rhythm of each line outside the definition of a meter, which often has two or three syllables.

Beyond this technical aspect, this poem is better spoken than read as it ably expresses the persona’s view on who a woman is when said out loud.

The last line is a fair attempt at using the word “cross”, the principal symbol of suffering, especially familiar to Christians, as a metaphor but then again it also comes across (pun unintended) as cross (angry).

This will leave the reader confused.

Zenah's poetry book Pulse

The rest of the poem should be instructive as to where she is going with this particular line. But these couplets are standalones and so they will not help much in helping the reader out of his or her confusion.

In Part Two of the book, the poem “I want to pursue you” switches to the first person singular with the persona’s use of “I”.

“I want to pursue you daily

Like my childhood dreams...” it reads in part, this is a very clever line.

Zenah with her book Pulse

In Part Three of the book, the verse “Until” is the probably the most uniformly powerful and passionately-held poem in the whole anthology.

“I want to slit you open,

Drink from the big nerve

Until i am fed, Until I am healed

From starvation.”

The images create the anatomy of love in a somewhat literal sense, thereby making them hit home as the persona’s love is expressed by a life-giving force transitioning from line to line as its energy is transmitted from body to body.

My favourite poem is “My father wasn’t man enough”, in Part Four of this anthology. This is because the title is an ironic twist on what the poem is actually about. As soon as one starts to read the poem, then, one is struck by how much of a man the persona’s father was.

However, the first two lines echo the poem’s title and brilliantly contradict its ultimate message:

“My father was not much of a man

like men of my generation…”

After these two lines, there’s a segue (a smooth transition from one thought to another) which effectively uses irony (and even satire) to drive home a point about how today’s men are half-men when measured against the towering greatness of the persona’s father.

The book’s last poem, Scars Don’t Bleed, is as smart as its title sounds. The only image I don’t care much for in this poem is “sobbing winds” because it brings to mind ‘wet winds’ which may be described as humid. How such imagery ties into the persona’s bloodless scars is unconvincing.

On the whole, though, Zenah’s book is a well written anthology delving into themes of femininity, humanity, love and self-acceptance in ways that celebrate the spirituality of the words, “I am A Woman I am Love”.