A Poet and His Divine Inquiry

Through a theological lens, Nigerian poet, Pamilerin Jacob, explores the sacred truths of spirituality in his poetry.

A palpable sentiment that permeates the oeuvre of Pamilerin Jacob’s poetry is a profound engagement with divinity—its appearance, its wonder and its manifestations, whether imagined, experienced, or witnessed. God is either represented or the evidence of God made visible, as seen in the line, ‘If not a metaphor,/ then foreknowledge’, from the poem, ‘Anti-Pastoral for Twenty-Faced Pathogen’, published in Poetry Foundation. The allusions in Jacob’s works are at best Socratic ironies, amplifying the tension between theism and antitheism. But Jacob asks: how can belief exist without a room called doubt for it to occupy? He makes a testament of this in the poem, ‘Epithet’: ‘light smeared like toothpaste around the edges of the old cold, obstruction—that doubt–dissolved.’ In ‘Studying The World’, Jacob continues,  

…we stood in a room 
like this one, debating the path dew takes 
back to the sky. Whether it grows more invisible 

at each increment of light, or some god sucks 
it up through a straw. It is possible we were happy 
studying the world, not in pursuit of wisdom, 

but liberation. .. 

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