The POET I met through WORDS: A review of Punctured Silence- by Abdulhafeez Oyewole

Actually, this review had been written a week ago and posted with a heading "The POET I met through WORDS: A review of Punctured Silence by Kolade Olanrewaju Freedom"

accordingly on my Facebook wall. I just decide to share it here as well.

The POET I met through WORDS: A review of Punctured Silence by Kolade Olanrewaju Freedom

By Abdulhafeez T. Oyewole

It is one thing to write, it is another thing to impart and impact through one’s writings. Affirmatively, Punctured Silence by Freedom did just the mentioned. I met the pen of the poet in tune to the heartfelt of any time of the day and I still meet it because of the informative, educative, inspiring and entertaining nature of the poems in the collection.

Punctured Silence is a work of art by my belief that has scaled through thick and thorn and skirmished cacophony kind of pun, snaking shabby into fun. I believe it’s the poet’s true ingenuity with words that has emblazoned his works across borders.

This one painstakingly written collections, Punctured Silence, with all sense of sincerity of purpose from the opening poem (Freedom) to the closing poem (Where Are the Elders Of the Land?) serves me right to the abyss of my love for the poet’s style of poetry that I can’t but acknowledge such self-containing and affirmative lines like “We wail as we sink in this sinking ship” (pg. 46), “I dip a blazing pen/Into my aerated soul/To puncture silence…” (pg. 40), “He, a gladiator; I, his radiator/I epitomize his valour/To floor his human flaws” (pg. 19) et cetera in the compilation.

What interests me most about the compendium is the revealing prowess of Kolade to engage his subjects each out-rightly with the right words in the right occasion. Read poems like: A Black Soil Is Never Barren, The Journey, Reviving Justice, Pity Us From Our Pit, Black Accusing Fingers, Anarchy, A Hollow Soul, Lady Black etc. in the anthology to spot the brilliance and visions his diction forms and describes expressively and impressively.

There are loads of dedicative poems as well as didactic poems to heritage, persons, places and society express in both praising and raving tones. There are also other poems that theme around nature, while some take to somewhat school of thoughts. Kolade’s poems here are wrapped with poetic devices such as allusion, refrain, persona, alliteration, hyperbole, rhetorical question, pun, metaphor, analogy, rhythm and rhyme and a host of other enthralling devices.

I have no iota of doubt that this collection will win the author more space in the literary sphere.

Hence, this inspired collection of seventy-two (72) poems “incubated by inspiration in the laboratory of thoughts” and which is also “a duplicative form of life that addresses the past in its quest to enlighten the present on how to mold the clayey future” is therefore suggested for the library of all lovers of literary ingenuity, in individual bodies and corporate organizations.