Book Review: Unravel

Jeswin Thomas

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

Tolu Oloruntoba’s new poetry collection, Unravel (McClelland & Stewart), offers something strangely mesmerizing — a deconstructed mind tethered to what it haunts. It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a groundbreaking work.

Oloruntoba, a trampset contributor, describes himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He practiced medicine in his native Nigeria before emigrating to Canada. His profuse vocabulary includes medical/scientific terminology that helps elicit, line by line, the dilemma of mortal existence. In lapsing professionally, the poet discovers space in the cracks of institutional society, between malady and cure, phenomena and knowledge, where a deeper study of the self is possible. Poetry is the method. Beneath “the petitions of my body,” a sense, often surreal, comes through “writs of trembling.”

“In this way is deathing a way of birthing: come to calve, / the doe of plasm arrives to deliver the spark it has unwrapped,” the poet writes in “A Mostly Private Corruption.”

Far from being alone in a vacuum, the poet is able to navigate a postcolonial world that is fed by “the genteel fuels of empire.” “Navigate” is probably the wrong word. More like piercing old maps until a new voice emerges — molten, effusive and prophetic.

My favorite stanza appears in “Contronym.”

“A camel, ferrous brown — shoes sharpened / to crampons — may be ideogram enough, needle enough / to pierce the left wall of wilderness sentience. Holdfast, / hold, fast, through the breach. / The one we must confront awaits.”

Calling this stanza “my favorite” might be a lie. “I Was Going To Buy a Parakeet, But the Laundromat Lost My Clothes” appeared in trampset and is a favorite for its weirdness. It involves a more literal unraveling. The poet says that by parakeets, he means books, songbird selves, voices as company. But to the laundromat the poet went:

“Train platforms / remind me of fragility. The laundromat, with its MonFri spin / cycle, its dryer-sheet currency, called, taunted. The snap / of the door had scattered, again, the thread from my clothes / in sudden flocks of lint. I already knew. I had begun to sift / down onto the November sidewalk. I, like the fabric / of my clothes, emulating the down of my birds, no scaffold / of beaks and claws to hold my strange, human, snow.”

The poem alights on unexpected softness. There are many such moments in this collection, amid anguished contortions and hauntings. Something unites the deconstruction. The book (over 90 poems) is alive with the invisible, that which stirs like “winds of an unstable outline.” Unravel brings to readers rich, inventive language that somehow opens the ineffable.