…one cannot ignore the element of fate that hovers over the collection. Fate is not merely a theme; it is a character, an unseen puppeteer in the theatre of the poems. The poet is simultaneously resigned and resistant. He dances with destiny, but not always willingly. This tension is what gives Curved Fortunes its vitality. The title itself speaks to the crooked lines by which our lives are drawn; the fact that nothing is straight, that all good things come curved: fortune, memory, justice, love.
Curved Fortunes is a collection of poems that explores the author’s interpretation of artworks and metaphorical evaluation of social issues. Immersed in philosophical thought, it addresses topics related to destiny, love, loss, history and nationhood.
The rich poetic tone of the collection spreads across its 110 pages, featuring 89 poems that emphasise a recurring fascination with fate and life through animate and inanimate objects.
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Curved Fortunes is a reinforcement of Mark Nwagwu’s curiosity about life and the elevation of poetry as a language of introspective expressions: “dedicated to Christopher Nonyelum Okeke, a diplomat, for his support of the arts and his publication of “Contemporary Art: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art” whose images and pages inspired much of (my poems) – poems” in the collection.
This review mirrors the intersection of the philosophical and metaphorical strands in Mark Nwagwu’s Curved Fortunes and begins with the following questions:
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What does one make of a poet who sings like an oracle and writes like a river? Who bends language, not out of weariness but from a wild enduring yearning, to grasp the marrow of existence?
In Curved Fortunes, Mark Nwagwu does not offer us a book of poems; he offers a metaphysical storm clothed in lyricism — a love letter to life and loss, an elegy to a nation, a canvas of cosmic questions and, above all, a long, unflinching stare into the soul of being. In the words of Kolade Olanrewaju Freedom, a poet and the author of Punctured Silence, “Curved Fortunes is a poet’s genuine interrogation of existence across the minute and profound, via lush lyricism.” Similarly, and bordering on the themes of love, philosophy and lyricism, Femi Morgan, author of The Year of Five, says the following of Curved Fortunes: “A volume rich in selfless rhetoric of love, rich in reflections of philosophy and mysteries that suffice from the depth of intricate human connections. Lyrical, resilient, and transformative.”
The cradle of this collection is no ordinary one. The book opens with the declaration, “I Was Born an Artist,” a sacred invocation, a declaration, a prophecy, wrapped in ancestral fabric. At its most accessible level, this poem is a maternal soliloquy; part prayer, part prophecy, delivered by a speaker on the brink of bringing life into the world. But this is no ordinary baby, not an ordinary mother. The opening lines are terse, raw, and resolute:
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“I will live…
this pregnancy will not kill me
this child will live to be born”
Embedded in these lines, is a storm, a defiance against mortality and misfortune. The poet immediately sets the stakes high; that birth is not a given; but a battle. And not just for survival, but for destiny. The poem wrestles with the terrifying possibility that this child, so full of potential, might disappear into the vast sea of life without recognition:
“…what will this child be, if he flows into shoreless oceans
& be perpetually lost, his gems untold?”
This is perhaps the emotional and philosophical heart of the poem. The artist is born with gifts; nuggets of wisdom, giant emeralds, but there’s no guarantee that these will be seen, heard, or understood. Here, Nwagwu laments the artist’s fate in a society that often buries geniuses in shallow graves. And yet, he rebels against erasure, invoking ancestral protection: “mbakwa, ughumkwa, eme ye eme, nakbu alusi”. This Igbo exclamation is not decorative. It is a ritual defiance.
“Mbakwa!” God forbid! This loss must not happen. The speaker calls on tutelary spirits (alusi) to ensure that the child’s story will not be swallowed by obscurity. This is more than maternal anxiety; it is existential outrage.
What animates the collection most vividly is love, not the kind that compels its host to offer gentle kisses on golden evenings, but a possession that culminates in reckless surrender. In “Write me a poem,” the poet says in a tone one might mistake for command, until one realises it is actually capitulation. Love here is not mere romance. It is longing ritualised, memory deified.
In “You Have Captured Me,” love is a force that seizes the artist, renders him restless: “…possesses me, enters my heart/flows in my veins, traverses my being…” This is not just a sentimental expression, but spiritual devotion, intense as prophecy and tender as a whisper from beyond the veil. Nwagwu’s women, Anyanwu, Miraimisa, and Ojiego are not just muses. They are deities, dancers, revolutionaries, and memory-keepers. In “Her Memory,” he writes, “her memory marvels, serenades streaming skies,” gifting us a vision of remembrance that is not passive, but active, majestic, and luminous. These poems do not simply remember; they resurrect.
Then there is the gnawing tug of existence, the poet’s constant interrogation of being and the spaces between. What is art, what is self, what is the meaning of living in a world where “rainbows are still seeking elections” and the very air may vanish? In one breath, we are with shepherds in Eden; in another, we are duelling faceless ideologies.
On “Boxing Day,” a day reimagined not for sport, but for existential battle, he says: “how do I know my enemy/if I cannot enter his mind/and flush out its insidious infidels?” That is the genius of Nwagwu’s poetry. It poses ancient questions in contemporary idioms, merging Biblical cadence with post-colonial critique; philosophical musing with lyrical fury. In “My Fear the Air I Breathe Might Disappear,” we find a man not afraid to speak of despair and indict the systems that manufacture it. His poetic voice moves from the ethereal to the earthly with unsettling ease. One moment he is contemplating eternity, and the next he is calling out the rot in Nigeria’s corridors of power, spitting righteous fire on “public servants” whose hands are slick with stolen futures.
The philosophical strand that weaves through Curved Fortunes is both introspective and societal. Nwagwu is not merely pondering the nature of being; he is interrogating the architecture of fate itself. Can destiny be rerouted? Are we all fish fated for Nineveh, no matter how hard we swim against the tide? His poems ask these, not as abstractions, but as lived experiences, especially for the Nigerian child, the African artist, the ageing philosopher who sees with unbearable clarity. When he muses, “Where Does Art Find Rest?,” he isn’t asking a rhetorical question. Instead, he is pleading, almost for a refuge, a sanctum where truth and form might meet and be enough. In his world, art is not merely a divine encounter, but also a dangerous calling. The artist is both prophet and prey, beloved and bereaved, fated and a fugitive. There are echoes here of Chinua Achebe’s moral clarity, of Wole Soyinka’s rage, but also of William Blake’s mysticism and Rabindranath Tagore’s grace.
And yet, for all its celestial preoccupations, the book is rooted deeply in our nation’s soil. Nwagwu’s patriotism is not the glossy, performative variety. Rather, it is gritty, painful, and honest. Nigeria is not romanticised; it is mourned.
In “They Must Pay,” the poet unleashes his scathing critique:
“…you can inherit diamonds stolen in the colonial days/of The Congo… /but in Nigeria, there are two simpler ways…”
This is not just poetry; it is witnessing. The metaphor here is molten. It burns with the anger of one who has seen the promise of post-independence turned into a carcass, whose children must now inherit sand, instead of gold. Yet even here, there is no full capitulation to despair. Nwagwu still finds ways to believe in a future Nigeria, perhaps out of stubborn hope or sheer poetic defiance.
Furthermore, one cannot ignore the element of fate that hovers over the collection. Fate is not merely a theme; it is a character, an unseen puppeteer in the theatre of the poems. The poet is simultaneously resigned and resistant. He dances with destiny, but not always willingly. This tension is what gives Curved Fortunes its vitality. The title itself speaks to the crooked lines by which our lives are drawn; the fact that nothing is straight, that all good things come curved: fortune, memory, justice, love.
Finally, Curved Fortunes is not an easy collection. It resists quick consumption, preferring instead to haunt, to linger in the corners of thought, long after its last line. It is both a memoir of a life fully lived and a manifesto of creative resistance. Mark Nwagwu has not just written poetry, he has offered a reckoning with love, loss, history, country, and the gods; essentially inspired, as earlier stated, by the images and pages of the publication of “Contemporary Art: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art.” At eighty-eight, Mark Nwagwu has offered us not a sunset, but a comet; a blazing, unpredictable curve of light across the firmament. Whether you read for meaning, for music, for memory, or for metaphor, you will find yourself within these pages. And perhaps, if you’re lucky, you’ll lose yourself in them too.
Eriata Oribhabor, a poet and author of Crossroads & The Rubicon, is the president of Poets in Nigeria Initiative.
This is the text of the presentation at the launch of Curved Fortunes on 14 June at the Pan-Atlantic University, Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos.
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