Poetry and versification: the burden of commitment draw foul or poisoned water – imaged here as “bubbles of corruption,
sludge/Of evil, graves unlaid to tears or dirge.” This then leads to the
desperate prayer of the sixth and seventh couplets, a prayer whose tran-
scendent accents have been prepared by the scale of corruption and evil
imaged in the two preceding couplets wherein “graves unlaid to tears
or dirge” distinctly recall the massacre of Igbos in northern Nigeria in
which was a major catalyst in the slide to the country’s civil war in
. It is indeed this careful anchoring of transcendent ruminations and
imaginings in collective and personal experience which makesA Shuttle
more than a volume of protest poetry. There is in some of the group-
ings of couplets in this particular poem, a tendency to push the scale of
the identification of the poet’s wandering mind with, on the one hand,
elemental regenerative processes of nature, and on the other, the degra-
dation of organic life and processes, to levels of abstraction unsupported
by the immediate, or surrounding, cluster of metaphors and images. But
it is also the case in nearly every instance that the alert critic or reader
who has maintained a sustained grasp of the shifting plethora of images
in the progression of the poem can find echoes, associations and reso-
nances which connect what, on the surface, appears to be floating ab-
stractions. One example of this pattern is the one we encounter in the
sixteenth to the twentieth couplets:
Roots, be the network of my large
Design, hold to your secret charge
All bedrock architecture raised to heal
Desert cries, desert lacerations; seal
In barks of age, test on battering-rams
Of your granite caps O breaker of dams
Pestle in earth mortar, ringer of chimes
In rock funnels, render mine Time’s
Chaplets, and stress to your eternal season
These inward plinths I raise against unreason.
(Shuttle,–)Without referring back to the “shuttle” as the master trope of stratagems
and projections which both ensured the poet’s survival from the mind-
destroying threat of solitary confinement for nearly two years and enabled
him to be creatively productive in spite of the prohibitions of his incar-
ceration, it would be impossible to keep track of the connection between
image or symbol and the transcendent values referenced in this sequence