Oceans In Your Lungs: A personal anthology of poems that preaches love, life grief, and death, and everything in-between

A review of Zainab Omotayo’s Oceans In Your Lungs by Chidiebere Udeokechukwu

OCEANS in your Lungs as a book title will attack your curiosity, but in an intriguing way. Consider the words again, and you will be moved to chuckle at Zainab Omotayo’s creative madness. As a title, “Oceans in your Lungs” suggests explosive imagery that makes you wonder whether that vast body of water can really fit into the small rib cage that protects your delicate lungs. While you may still struggle to contain the wonder in that possibility, be sure to realise that the poems to follow, will be much more than serendipities.

The first section of the anthology is a packet of poems that literally presents Love As Flowers. Zainab’s perspective of Love, an often misunderstood and much maligned phenomenon, is perhaps interestingly outlandish. How often will you stumble upon contemporary poems (like My Child, Genesis and A Beautiful Mess) that preach pure altruism? How often have you read sensual pieces that will ultimately edify and upgrade your imaginations about love? Be assured that Zainab’s love poems will ideally conspire to introduce you to worlds hardly imagined.

In the second lot, Zainab portrays human nature as a Cauldron Of Conundrums. Again, her otherworldly perspectives on anxiety, fear, repining sorrow, bondage and the bravery of womanhood, will not fail to stir up questing questions in your mind– enough to cause a pause in your readings, and nudge you into a trance of very necessary contemplations on the wars you fight within yourself. Perhaps, the most intriguing poem of this second lot, is “4.44” which forebears fear by reminding you that “your life is ticking”.

In the next grouping of poems, there is a heavy hint of grief, heartbreak and fear,andof death and all his friends. Zainab’s methodical and conceptual presentation of these stubborn phenomena, through “a confessional writing style”, evokes a gripping realisation— that death and all his friends, fear and grief, and everything in between, are faithful companions unto each man. Then there is that angry undertone in the remaining poems that share wanderings about self-conflict and love unrequited.

If the previous sections hold poems that inspire angst, anger and anguish, the very last lot of works are writings at the opposite end of the spectrum. Indeed, Zainab paints a picture— or rather, pictures of Hope As Rays Of Sunlight. There is the beam of hope itself which Zainab presents in a friendly and confessional artistry. There are also poems, poised as shafts of joy and unhinged gratitude for the gift of life. Surely, you will be moved by the poems that adulate the gifts of fatherhood and motherhood; and there is one more poem that inspires stubborn optimism in the face of the varying vicissitudes of life.

On a final note, you may have noticed a very contagious glam of vulnerability and naked honesty in Zainab Omotayo’s style of writing. These traits re-echo the confessional approach to writing contemporary poetry. In fact, Oceans in your Lungs may probably remind you of a three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, Ellen Bass; who invests honesty and vulnerability in her poems, just as Zainab does. Suffice it to underscore the realisation that will hit you upon reading Oceans in Your Lungs— that as an anthology of poems that evoke vulnerability and truth in a friendly and confessional style, the book is a very promising read.

Udeokechukwu, a review writer and editor, is a recipient of the Third prize for poetry in the 2022 Creators of Justice Literary Awards (IHRAF). He was also long listed in the 2022 Briefly Write Poetry Prize and has been long-listed in the 2023 Writing Ukraine Prize.

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