New Telegraph 
If the 10 definitions of poetry propounded by Carl Sandburg (1878) are used as yardsticks to classify Yusuf Adamu’s poetry volume titled A Flat World, one could say the seventh definition best describes Adamu’s cosmological verses full with acres of anger.
Sandburg’s seventh definition of poetry says “poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it.”
In this wise, as a medical geographer cum poet, Adamu always employ different commendable instruments of geography in his psyche, such as barometer, compass, wind vane, thermometer, rain-gauge, telescope and so on, in investigating both local and international political weather and cultural climates; and voices out his observation in poetic garments.
Hence, in A Flat World, comprising 51 poems that span 69 pages of the volume, the reader encounters various paradoxical situations that are making the world a better place for many peace-loving people; due to bullies on both the local and international topography and socio-cultural spheres.
Wondering why acrimony pervades human existence, the author rhetorically welcomes the reader with the first poem in the volume titled, Why Do We Fight?
Although, rhetorical questions don’t deserve answers, Adamu generously provide answers in Why Do We Fight? as follows: “Sometimes we fight / For sacred reasons / Sometimes we fight / To emancipate ourselves / But at times we fight / For naïve and selfish reasons / We fight to make life hard for others / We fight to make the world a brutal place / But must we always fight to have peace? / Isn’t there any other way? / Why must we always fight?”
Having set the ball rolling with the aforesaid poem, the poet paints a beautiful can vass of the hitherto peaceful Jos plateau in Nigeria, which has suddenly become a theatre of concurrent genocide in recent times over the years.
Listen to Adamu in the poem titled The Jos Plateau I, where he geographically, socially and resourcefully versify the region in a Michelangelo-like artistic imagery thus:
“Tin ores and mines / Volcanic cones and dones / Crater lakes and ponds / Spring-water and waterfalls / Escarpments and slopes / Fluvio-volcanic and granitic hills / Spread on the table land / Nations of people / Biroms, Angas / Pyem, Mwhavul / Mada, Irigwe / Hausa, Fulani / Irish potatoes and maize / Vegetables and fruits / Cool weather, fine scenery / Jos plateau / Land of nature and nations.”
This versification of Jos by the poet clearly shows that it is a place of multiple natural blessings. Who knows? Perhaps, Jos is the original much talked about biblical Garden of Eden.
From the first two poems in the volume already discussed, the reader is not surprised why Adamu is so annoyed with the spate of quarrels, killings and disunity among local, national and international folks in a paradise earth created by God for human enjoyment.
On this basis, the reader could feel the author’s cup of thoughts winking with worries at the brim of consciousness like a traffic light.
Therefore, with poems such as The Oro Trap; Ungrateful Brothers; Global Village; Arrogance; Prime Suspect; Injustice; Crumbling Blocks; Filters; Strange Irony; Reciprocate With Love Not With Bombs; Branding; New Imperialism; Murder Is Murder; Pretence; The Rich; Stature’s Ordeal; New Freedom; Hypocrites; Cowardice; The Holocaust Card; Immigration Laws; Niamey; Baghdad; International Community; Bushnization; The Migrants; Palestine; The Wolrd After Bush; Jos Plateau II, Gaza; Blind Hearts; Fuel Subsidy; and so on, Adamu expresses his unhappiness with the systems of things going on in the world.
This is in similitude with some poems in Adjekpagbon Blessed Mudiaga’s Nightmares in Paradise volume, of contemporary poets.
which underline the thinking patterns While conjuring metaphors, ironies, innuendos, amongst other literary devices blended in the frying-pan of sarcasm, Adamu’s poetry hisses with volcanic gases bombarding traitors and oppressors gallivanting worldwide.
Moreover, in some lines, you could feel the temperature of the poet persona’s emotion, eager to imprison every global evil doer.
The thermostat of his verses is full of brimstone, sulphur, caustic soda, magma, monosaccharide and disaccharide, belching like an angry anaconda, warning the real terrorists of the world, spreading tongue like dark menacing winds.
In the light of the foregoing, one could say the title of the volume, A Flat World, is a metaphorical microcosm of Jos as an epic center symbol of the entire world, where abundant milk and honey flows, but hatred, sorrow and death are the ‘medals of joy’ some self-acclaimed saints of universal authority shower on weaker people daily.
Despite all the oppressive tendencies of the powers that be from the grassroots to international level, Adamu rolls up every atom of his anger from ‘A Flat World’ into a ball of defiant hope in the book last poem titled ‘Our Spirit Has Not Broken!’.
In the epilogue poem, he pays glowing homage to some personalities coupled with prayer in the last line.
Adamu is a professor of Medical Geography at the Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria. He has published numerous works in Hausa and English languages.
