Shadrach Ambanasom's creative pen has once more graced our literary shores with a scintillating collection of fifty poems crafted "essentially in a Neo-Romantic mood" and being in the main, "transmutations and commemorations of things, events, and people" (iv) the poet holds dear in his life.

The structural pattern of the collection bears witness to this defining sentence given the work's division into two distinct but unequal parts titled, Part 1 "Homage" (28 poems) and Part 2, "Courtship",( 22 poems).

Generally, the titles of the parts delineate the broad thematic preoccupations of the collection but, besides questions of honour, tribute and courtship, the poems negotiate the childhood kingdom, the transience of life, technology, nature and nostalgia, among other concerns.

The poems in the first part pay homage to icons and beacons at the family and community levels, to places and to significant milestones in the poet's experience.Poems like "Abendong", "Icon and Beacon", "The Talented Three", "Ebang Iroko", "The Last Salute", and "A Grain of Corn" deal with the loss of loved ones.

Here, the pain of loss, man's helplessness in the face of death, the devastating consequences of death at the personal and communal level are underscored through imagery, allusions, alliterations and repetitions. In most of these poems, the natural environment integrates the poetic experience as a purveyor of mood and attitude.

In "Icon and Beacon", for example, we are told that the passing of Babila John Njingum, has left 'frightened flora and fauna unprotected' and the ENSAB landscape is now 'an endangered habitat at the mercy of ogres' (22).

In these examples, landscape metaphors serve to highlight the frailty of human life in the face of wickedness and determined evil. Furthermore, the structural repetition of 'it tolls' underscores the music of lament and reinforces the idea of the inevitability of death.

In "Abendong", the messianic stature of Zacharias Abendong in Dudum is emphasised through references to myth and the obvious parallels between this son of the native soil and Jesus Christ. The effect of this man's demise on the community assumes apocalyptic proportions in the following lines;Discordant sounded the music of the spheres,

the sun spun around the other planets,graves and tombs stood gaping when Zacharias Abendong from the world closed his eyes and breathed his last (13).

The parallels between Abendong and Lucas Achamba of Son of the Native Soil fame will not escape the sensitive reader, especially, as the poet discloses the relationship between the writing experiences of both works in the preface to the collection.

"One Year Old", "Alma Mater", and "The Ruined Palace", celebrate events and places dear to the poet. "Alma Mater", for example, pays tribute to the poet's alma mater, CPC Bali, one of Anglophone Cameroon's famed institutions of learning, lifting it above the ordinary run of education establishments in the country.

We are told in the poem that the college is 'the rippling pool of bottomless lore,' 'a solicitous mother hen', 'pride of our fatherland', and 'trumpeter of hope.' These metaphors are carefully selected to delineate the stature of CPC and underscore the poet's attitude towards this institution.

"The Dreadful Monster", "A Plea for Mercy", "Hoarded Impressions" and "4 Ways to Dispatch Yourself" are philosophical musings on the HIV/AIDS pandemic, growing old, the threat of the nuclear holocaust and the negative effect of excesses of any kind.

"4 Ways to Dispatch Yourself", in effect, is a humorous jibe at our 'beer guzzling culture' with its disastrous effects on those who want to become "famous fuddler[s]" (20).The courtship poems are focalised on Lady Zee, the poet's Muse, who inspires him to write passionate poetry celebrating her physical and moral excellence. Lady Zee is 'sans pareil' because her beauty is natural and untainted as we find in poems like "You are the Best", "All for a Face", "Beauty beyond Compare" and "My Superstella."

We encounter the speaker's ardent passion for this woman and her effect on him in "Her Smiles", "We are One", "On Meeting Lady Zee" and "A Universal Tyrant." What we gather from these poems is that the lover cannot resist loving his beloved and each time passion is remembered, it is celebrated.

At another level, romantic love and nature fuse together to highlight the reciprocity of love in "Go and Tell Lady Zee", "She Brightens All", and "A Moment Ago." In "Go and Tell Lady Zee", for instance, the wind becomes a harbinger of love, a natural messenger who must urgently inform the mistress of the poet's feelings.

In pure romantic overtones, the month of May (when nature is reborn) becomes the month of celebrating reciprocal love of the kind existing between the poet-persona and his lady. This is romantic in perspective. Repetitions of words and phrases equally signal the urgency of communicating the emotion of love and loyalty to the mistress.

Where love and passion meet, they cannot but call forth desires and wishes for the beloved. One of these aspirations is for her to "become our own Jane Austen" (60) given her "growing interest in [his] songs" and "alert mind on the way to fictional adventure." This is the dominant idea in "The Dream" and "Future Woman of Letters."

Ambanasom's poetic territory is wide, signalling the hybridism of the poet whose effective blending of African and European experiences achieves harmony of thought and technique in the collection. It is in this wise that we discern echoes of oral tradition in "A Wise Dwarf", reminiscences of the Nigerian Gabriel Okara and Wole Soyinka in "The Sky Weeps and "On Losing my Hair", respectively.

Tennysonian, Spenserian, Shakespearean, Wordsworthian, Donnean and Blakean parallels are observable in "The Last Salute", "The Dream", "Her Smiles", "The Mosquito" and "The Horse Rider." All these influences give the poetry both an African and a global appeal in these times when our destinies are unmistakeably assuming multicultural dimensions.

The richness of a poem, C. K. Stead has told us, is heightened by the appropriate use of words to expose mood and atmosphere. In this collection, Ambanasom inserts the appropriate word for the appropriate emotion, using images to clothe his thought; images assembled from things actually seen and intimately known.

In addition, the poetry achieves music and rhythm through diction, alliteration, repetition, assonance and the rhythmic cadence of the structure of some of the poems. This, to my mind, constitutes the forte of the poetry.

*Eunice Ngongkum is Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Literature of the University of Yaoundé 1.

TITLE:Homage and Courtship (Romantic Stirrings of a Young Man). ISBN: 9956-557 455

AUTHOR: Shadrach A. Ambanasom, PUBLISHER: Agwecam Printers Bamenda, 2007

PRICE: 1500 FCFA, REVIEWER: Eunice Ngongkum (PhD)*