A Phial of Passing Memories

James Yeku's second collection lingers on a poetics of elsewhere, as seen through poems that evoke various memories. In A Phial of Passing Memories, the poems offer shifting sceneries that record the everyday and chronicle vagrant seasons. This collection presents the vivid imagination of a keen mind documenting the passing rhythms of the abiding and the mundane, unfurling in a dance of elegance and lyrical beauty. The poems meander but remain anchored in particular geographies, from where they engage the varied cadences of the human condition. They blend the strange and the familiar into a meditation on the power of unforgetting, the enjambments and stoppages of journeys, and the nature of things themselves.