Inspired by an unidentified boy found dead in the Thames, the first – and only – collection by the late poet is an imaginative meditation on death and those who disappear
This collection is a debut – it is also an ending. The poet Gboyega Odubanjo died tragically almost a year ago and the final edit of this extraordinary and arresting book has been overseen by friends, family and his publishers. It is, in one sense, a found poem – or series of poems – about something not a soul would ever wish to find. On 21 September 2001 – anyone alive at that time will remember it – the headless torso of a boy was discovered in the Thames, in the stretch near the Globe theatre, dressed in a pair of orange girls’ shorts. It was police officers who gave him the name of Adam. And although detectives went on to discover that he had been brutally dismembered in a ritual sacrifice – perhaps to win a business deal or secure good luck – the murderer was never confirmed and the case never closed.
Odubanjo’s book takes Adam as his starting point and the name itself becomes a promise, a provocation, a vehicle for his ideas. Adam is old and new and black, and Odubanjo has produced a powerful and calculatedly distorted version of Genesis, mixed in with Yoruba culture. He describes an Eden too compromised to allow the familiar story root room. His creation myth lurches forward as he proves here, and elsewhere, that he is a master at allowing anguish and comedy to share the same space. In the newly created landscape, Odubanjo folds in an underground map (he was born and raised in east London):
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