The Boundless Figures of Adam

In the 1994 essay, ‘Three Acts of Criticism’, American literary critic, Helen Vendler, writes that ‘theme untransformed is theme unimagined.’ If there is one truth a poet must know, understand and embody in their poetic performance, it is the essence of this Vendlerian aphorism. Gboyega Odubanjo demonstrates this mastery in his new collection of poems, Adam, following commendable experiments in his earlier, shorter works. This truth is evident because the central character of the book—an unidentified boy between four and eight, named ‘Adam’ by the police, whose torso was discovered in the River Thames, London, on 21 September 2001—is not confined in Odubajo’s literary reimagination to the singular tragedy of the fate of Adam. Adam is not stretched out merely for the sake of thematic discursiveness, but rather for maximal symbolic transumption. Simply put, Adam becomes a rhetorical projection—a kind of poetic narrative complex. His name becomes the storied yet widely debated I, you and we of the poems in which he appears.