Rumbles from Serene Heights

By Celestine Chukwuma Nweze

Poetry is like painting. “Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with a gift of speech” (Simonides 556-468 BC).
Many poems are like abstract painting in regard and usefulness. In the following pieces will be seen paintings in true colour and perceptible imageries of various appeals, in accordance with my feelings in diverse issues, which I hope will offer you valuable gifts.
Salvatore Quasimodo says that “Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.” The hope is that so will these presentations also be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781716265105

Book preview

Rumbles from Serene Heights

Celestine Chukwuma Nweze

Dr C. C. Nweze

The True Vine Clinic

184 Agbani Road

Enugu

[e-mail]

fountainheadrepository.com 

First Published 2017

Revised 2020

All Rights Reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photographing, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the author

ISBN: 978-1-716-26510-5

OVERTURE

I woke up to life on earth in a place where I did come to birth but the recognized environment of beholding the world in true colour and human culture is a place of such peace and truly glamorous simplicity of life: Ugwuoma.

Sometime ago, a strangely accurate cord was struck in my heart, and I thought we were talking of the same place, when Dolly Parton sang In my Tennessee mountain home, life is as peaceful as the baby inside… . Sing same for Ugwuoma which literally means Lovely Highland. This is a picturesque but simple habitation of sacred people of sublime culture and outlook, located in Ogugu, a community in Awgu Local Government Area of Enugu State of Nigeria.  Notably calm and composed is life at these heights.

I started appreciating and being influenced by an existing mode of life which I consider a very rich heritage: normal life here, among other things, is highly philosophical and seems necessarily inclined to pragmatic conservatism and natural preservation of sacredness and dignity, and to pursuit of excellence. Mode of expression is one of the things that show fort this ingrained element in a fabric from heritage. I am not sure I got a nearly full deposit of it in my nurture having spent most of my time in the cities, necessarily, only having spent up to eight consecutive years in my hometown during the days of the Nigerian civil war, yet a primary school leaver, and the five years of secondary school directly thereafter.  I was, however, lucky to have lived all my impressionable childhood, before the war, in the city of Enugu with my parents who were very traditional people and were naturally serious with traditional nurturing, they also having uninterruptedly lived in my hometown to adulthood before starting to go about.

Expressions from my people are characterized by being seemingly measured and mostly possessing undertones. Adults and children alike make speeches that are rather graphic, with few words expressing volumes. Proverbs are easily employed to garnish speeches and make them have the desired effects.  I feel that anyone raised in such an environment is likely to appreciate poetry very much, like I did when I started reading poetry. Their expressions are like language at its most distilled and most powerful; and this is what a great poet, Rita Dove, says Poetry is. They are also like the best words in the best order, in conformity with a definition of poetry by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another celebrity poet.

I owe a major part of my inspirations to my Ugwuoma upbringing. A great part I also owe to my appreciation of the wonderful Yoruba culture and the absorptions from the intellectual attitudes in the South-West part of Nigeria, during my very eventful sojourn at the University of Ibadan where I spent four years studying Physiology and five years studying Medicine, after a one year National Youth Service, in between, at Oshogbo which is also in South-West Nigeria; this is seen in their avid universal promotion of excellence. Opportunity was also availed me at Ibadan to appreciate the beautiful kaleidoscope that is Nigerian culture.   

Igbos, in general, as well as other Africans, seem to find proverbs, metaphors and idiomatic expressions very indispensable hence the common adage in Igboland that proverb is the palm oil sauce with which speech is eaten. Pure poetry is also common here and poetry is richly found in our music, stories and various other verbal actions in Africa. African poetry is indigenous and is very rich. African poems are mostly very instructive and are more easily understood than Western poems, I feel. Most choice poems from European authors, and some American authors, sound rather abstract and seem to be designed to prevent it from being easy to understand its story or the instruction it is imparting. They seem to be encrypted by an overly clever couching and deeply personalized construction, using imageries that far remove the straight meaning, efficiently hiding it and seemingly beckoning on you to fruitlessly search for it. This, probably, is why Isaac Newton referred to poetry as a kind of ingenious nonsense.

All my formal education programs after secondary school have been in the Science based disciplines and I have never engaged in any formal study of English Literature or Poetry at any level, but I have had special love and serious interest in poetry. Reading most of the pieces of modern poetry, I got disappointed and nearly believed I would never be able to write poems that could impress any poetically-informed audience, as I judged the poems to be highly technical and understood by only those schooled in Poetry.

Looking back, however, I recalled the wonderful exploits of my classmate in the Medical School, Emmanso Umobong, in poetry, as a fellow student of Medicine. I also recalled how I took Fine Art in the School Certificate examination without ever receiving any teaching in it (since Fine Art was not in my Secondary School’s curriculum) and got a credit, only with my natural talent for Fine Art. I had