on Selina Nwulu & Solmaz Sharif

Dark Vibrant Spaces

Bloomsbury’s recent publications tend to engage traumatic histories, diasporic stories and motherhood while being formally inventive. Selina Nwulu’s A Little Resurrection has titles, themes and images that repeat, adding texture and character to a typical poem, for example in ‘Cords That Cannot Be Broken’:

travelling continents, clinging to the cross
for protection and our tongues an heirloom

carrying the continuum of time;
Sunday School ritual, greased hair

The images refer to chosen family and actual family, but the title is more conventional than the language in the poem. When Nwulu writes more difficult, oblique poems, like ‘Fisherman At Ouakam Beach, Dakar’, they connect more surely:

I am in awe of how much the landscape
wants them, extends its hospitality through the sun,
its rays an opening blossom seeking only
to fortify their blackness, the two-tier blue
of sky and sea illuminating the contours
of their silhouettes.

Throughout, Nwulu is painterly in her use of colour, belonging and movement. Awe in these poems coexists with scientific language, natural images, shadow, beauty, darkness and light.

Solmaz Sharif’s Customs invokes deliberate distance and separation, but without recourse to formal language to draw in her readers. Sharif uses an extended metaphor of the airport customs, referencing this liminal space closely in the poems ‘Visa’ and ‘Social Skills Training’, whose questions include:

What the fuck are you crying for, officer? the
wire mother teaches me to say, while studies suggest Solmaz,
have you thanked your ...