82nd Division by D. M. Aderibigbe

Akashic Books. 2025. 88 pages.

D. M. Aderibigbe’s new collection of poems, 82nd Division, chronicles history with indelible craftsmanship. “Written after” Natasha Trethewey’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection Native Guard, it draws traceable inspiration from that book in the way that it explores the lives of the West African soldiers who fought alongside the British in World War II. With a capacious breath for forms, ranging from villanelle, duplex, ode, sonnet, blues, and dramatic monologue, it examines Nigeria’s colonized past through the sensibilities of a poet with a keen awareness of history, place, and time.

In these poems, Aderibigbe does not set out to mourn but to preserve in form, in music, and, with striking clarity, the brutality of colonization, the childhood memories of growing up in a high-spirited country, and experiencing love, loss, and kinship. In the hands of an inexperienced poet, the cinematic gaze that these poems offer, alongside a tensile musicality that lingers, would be poorly executed, in turn mishandling their sentiment, a sentiment that moves and, for sure, drives to tears. Divided into six sections, the first section starts out with a poem that gives a nod to Lagos, a large metropolitan city in southwestern Nigeria, where Aderibigbe was born some decades ago. He eulogizes the city like the good son of the soil that he is:

I stand in the land of lagoons
where sons of the soil became visitors
to their own visitors—
as local lore tells us.
Eko akete, ilu ogbon. Lagos . . .

In poems like “An Explanation of Colonialism,” “A Brief History of Pride,” and “82nd Division,” he elevates the West African soldiers who fought alongside the British in World War II. In “A Brief History of Pride,” through the voice of Acting Consul General James Robert Phillips, leader of the British Army, which attempted to seize the West African coastal kingdom of Benin and suffered defeat from the hands of the Benin Kingdom’s guard, he interrogates the historical representation of the conquered and conqueror.

D. M. Aderibigbe’s quality of observation suffuses these poems, stretching the barriers of language and history. Like every major poet, he shows intricate concern for the personal and communal, the historical and often overlooked ordinariness of living. In “Lunch Break,” he finds shared similarities in his struggle with loneliness and the struggle of a kitten with hairy puzzles around his legs. The music of his lines—like “leaves latched onto slices of sunlight”—shine through. The concerns of these poems are unpretentious yet leave us dabbed with insight.

Adeniyi Odukoya
Brown University