The Years Of Blood

“In the haunting horrorscape of these poems, crying bones usurp the streets; ‘days of vanishing’ darken into nights of wrenching anguish. ‘Everywhere weed grows is a wide mouth eating children’. The Years of Blood, trains a riveting searchlight on ritual murder and kidnapping, two of contemporary Nigeria’s horrific crimes, with particular stress on Nigerian childhood. Chilling and surreal in their feverish figurations, damning in their harrowing detail, these poems achieve a stunning balance between verbal density, formal experimentation, and intensity of content. Sonnets flutter with ‘severed limbs’ . . . Here is a prime instance of poems unafraid of showing and telling.”

—Niyi Osundare

“The Years of Blood is written in the wake of catastrophe, which, Agarau reminds us, is not ever over. With exquisite sensitivity, rigorous measure, and steadfastness, Agarau writes a history in which the personal and lyrical necessarily run through its marrow. He attends to this world with such prayerful regard for the granular – the spider, “the flock of children,” “the opaqueness of rain” filling a woman’s dream – that we are soon overwhelmed by the scale of devastation he writes into. The poems attempt to wrest language out of terror’s domain, saying what is unsayable. And where memory is burned, there is still the trace of absence, signaled there. To know what violence is, what terror is. To not turn away from the details of a life as it is squandered, killed. Here, in this impossible ceremony of remembrance, love, and grief, Agarau “starts a song, fills his mouth with a stash of feathers, briefly lending his throat..." making the most intimate of traces.”

—aracelis girmay, the black maria

“In Adedayo Agarau’s The Years of Blood, the weight of disappearance hangs heavy over memory. The fortunate, still here, lament: “our friend/ leaves school & does not reach home,” as the children’s bodies echo, everywhere and nowhere. There is gentle recognition in the eyes of the missing; their mothers salvage hope and refuse to let the dead in. Evil is a question for God and beauty emerges despite what the politicians have ruined. How many ways can the poet craft an elegy? In this harrowing collection, Agarau shapes and sifts through shadow until light treads steadily home.”

—Remica Bingham-Risher

“Adedayo Agarau is a visionary, and I say that aware of the full weight of that word. The Years of Blood is a fully realized debut: formally fluid, sonically striking, and compellingly honest. More significantly, in a world that clamours for universality, Agarau looks within—invested in bringing to mind the beauty and brutality of his community, reminding us that humans are more alike than they are not.”

—Michael Aderibigbe

“In The Years of Blood, Adedayo Agarau processes a tenebrous world in lyric safelight. What emerges from his darkroom indict society's ubiquitous cruelty. Yet, amid precarity there is hope, and rebirth, and even joy. These elements combined reveal Agarau as an avatar of poetic alchemy."

—Tade Ipadeola, author of The Sahara Testaments

“Dredging up both personal and collective memories, Agarau recruits the lyric form in his stark appraisal of postcolonial Nigeria. A debut of rare clarity and power.”

—Dami Ajayi, author of A Woman’s Body is a Country