Mishaps and Other Poems by Bill Ndi

Bill F. Ndi. Mishaps and Other Poems, Authorhouse, 2008.

The poems presented in Mishaps are highly varied, impressively experimental, sensitive and reflective across an astonishingly broad range of experience, and deeply moving in the richness of their humanity. Through each of them, resonates Bill’s vision of poetry as a special annunciation and of the poet as seer, as spokesperson, recorder, analyst, adjudicator and above all, as the reminder to each of us of the best that is so easily lost to the deathly universe of habit and blunted perception, to both the deadening routines of daily life and domestic regimes and to the crueller hand of oppression, authoritarianism, and misused authority in all its forms, from the primitive imposition of will through brute power political gangsterism, corruption and ‘state-orchestrated perjury’, as he calls it in ‘Sights Along Abakwa Ring Road’, through to the often less identifiable and far more insidious regimes of international finance, World Bank, ‘Black Debt’, and the hidden swindlings of the international monetary system. A collection full of richness and diversity everyone should read in its entirety.

Michael Meehan (Writer & Critic, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia)