Review with Muhammad

How could one jot down sounds void of words? The sudden tickles within the head, the uninvited flashes of thought, the glimpses of inspiration were all captured and scribbled as Wordless Sounds by Professor Yusuf Muhammad Adamu as narrated in these lines: “It all started in a dream The muse keeps coming The fingers keep its promise The pen keeps bleeding.” It was a twelve-month project, as each poem came with a date tag signifying the period of its conception (from May 19, 2020 to May 20, 2021). Prof. Yusuf Adamu is an author to reckon with, a scholar in its fullest meaning, a critic, and a blogger. This collection contains 73 poems and most striking part of it is the similar pattern of four lines that was maintained throughout the book which brought to light the author’s poetic brilliance and mastery of condensing complex messages. He opened the collection with an Escape: “At the edge There is cliff I wish I have wings.” You may not have wings, but flight is all you shall have in this...

The piece is accurately as described by BM Dzukogi; “Delicate, beautiful. Expressively ruthless lines.” It’s a poetry collection published in 2019 containing 116 poems that cut across many themes; uprightness, spirituality, romance, grief and some of the pressing national concerns, especially insecurity that caused turmoil in our education. One will carte away not just the sweetness of poetry, but wisdom, artistical constructions of expressions, close-to impossible imageries, breath-taking figurative expressions and tons of astounding vocabularies.  The author’s skill of playing with words is superb as one will inevitably get drawn in the amazing stream of legendary construction techniques therein. Since from inception, Malam Umar Dada Paiko expressed himself as a product of divine art in his dedication segment thus: “To Mother who Allah used to write me.” He further went ahead to unleash the conception of poetry in his How to Cook a Poem by saying:  “minds give thoughts finge...