A Tale of Being, of Green and of Ing: A Poetic Meditation on Nigeria, Mortality and Motion

Yewande Adebowale’s A Tale of Being, of Green and of Ing arrives as an ambitious poetic work that resists easy classification. Structured as a metaphysical triptych of sixty three poems, the collection moves through philosophy, nationhood and continuity with unusual confidence, blending spiritual reflection with political consciousness and environmental imagery. The result is a body of work that reads less like a traditional poetry collection and more like a sustained meditation on existence itself.

Divided into three movements of twenty one poems each, the book unfolds with deliberate symmetry. The first section, Being, explores the soul and the question of eternity. Here, Adebowale approaches mortality not with terror, but with contemplation. Death is not framed as disappearance or collapse, but as passage into another state of awareness.

The poems suggest that human existence stretches beyond visible time, allowing grief to coexist with transcendence. In these pages, the poet examines the fragile boundary between the physical and the eternal, asking readers to reconsider what it truly means to exist.

The second movement, Green, grounds the collection firmly within the realities of the natural and political world. Through the lens of contemporary Nigerian life, Adebowale captures a nation suspended between beauty and strain. Nature emerges as both sanctuary and metaphor. Forests, rivers, rain and fertile landscapes stand in sharp contrast to civic unrest, institutional failures and social exhaustion. Yet the poems do not descend into bitterness. Instead, they portray the land itself as enduring, resilient and deeply alive. Nigeria appears not as abstraction, but as emotional terrain marked by contradiction, pressure and enduring vitality.

What distinguishes this section is its refusal to romanticize either nationhood or suffering. Adebowale understands the tension of loving a homeland while confronting its fractures. The green of the landscape becomes layered with meaning. It symbolizes abundance and fertility, but also survival under pressure. The poet’s environmental imagery functions not as decorative backdrop, but as commentary on the persistence of life amid instability.

The final section, Ing, serves as the philosophical anchor of the collection. Drawing from the grammatical suffix associated with continuous action, Adebowale transforms language itself into a worldview. Here, movement becomes central. Living, healing, rebuilding and enduring are presented as ongoing states rather than final destinations. The poems suggest that existence is never static. Everything remains in motion, shaped by cycles of growth, loss, recovery and continuation.

This concept gives the collection its intellectual coherence. By linking spiritual reflection with national identity and natural processes, Adebowale creates a unified poetic framework in which the soul, the earth and time itself remain interconnected. The book repeatedly returns to the idea that life unfolds in progressive tension, never entirely fixed and never entirely finished.

Stylistically, the collection embraces rhythm, repetition and incantatory phrasing. Many poems move with the cadence of oral tradition, carrying the emotional intensity of communal reflection rather than solitary confession. Adebowale’s voice remains lyrical without sacrificing clarity, philosophical without losing emotional depth.

A Tale of Being, of Green and of Ing ultimately succeeds because of its scale and conviction. It asks large questions about existence, society and continuity while remaining grounded in human feeling. In doing so, Yewande Adebowale offers a poetry collection that is intellectually ambitious, emotionally resonant and unmistakably rooted in the complexities of Nigerian life.