Letter to Patience (Paperback)

"Letter to Patience" is a book-length poem in iambic pentameter, set in 'Patience's Parlour' a small, mud-walled bar in northern Nigeria in 1993 - a time of political unrest. The writer of the letter has returned to Britain, with his Nigerian wife and children, to nurse his dying father. He writes to Patience, the bar's owner, a woman in her 30s who once lectured in politics at Ahmadu Bello University, across the main road from her bar. She gave up her job partly because of junta pressures on radical academics. The town is volatile - the bar was attacked by the so-called Ayatollahs and would have been burnt had it not adjoined the property of her Hausa landlord. There are also thoughtful and elegant digressions thrown up by the multiple narratives. The book is not just biography or an essay on colonialism and post-colonialism, it is an epic portrayal of a beautiful and troubled country and one man's search for meaning in difficult times. All this is conveyed through a superbly crafted and thrillingly written poem.