A long poem set in 'Patience's Parlour', a bar in Northern Nigeria, in 1993, a time of political unrest. It offers an insight to life's difficulties, and a man's search for meaning in difficult times. First published in 2006.

Cerdd hir wedi'i gosod yn 'Patience's Parlour', bar yng ngogledd Nigeria, yn 1993 adeg gwrthdaro gwleidyddol, yw'r gyfrol hon. Ceir yma olwg ar anawsterau bywyd ac ymgais dyn i chwilio am ystyr byw a bod mewn cyfnodau anodd. Cyhoeddwyd gyntaf yn 2006.

John Haynes, a distinguished academic, linguist and poet, taught in northern Nigeria for nearly 20 years. He returned to England in the 1990s, with his Nigerian wife and children, to nurse his dying parents. Patience, the intended recipient of this verse 'letter', was a Benin-born woman lecturer who was pushed out of her job by government opposition. She set up a village bar which became a meeting-place not only for locals but also academics and radical friends. The bar was periodically attacked by local Muslim gangs and her survival is by no means certain.

John remembers her and writes through the night, recalling both his years in Africa, his childhood and his parents' lives as music hall entertainers. Bound up with both personal and family memories are the complexities of colonial guilt towards Africans. The African years obviously colour and compromise his earlier memories of his parents' performance as 'concert party minstrels'.

The letter seems a rambling stream of memories, stories and snapshots in a casual, conversational style. It is actually 52 cantos of tightly rhymed terza rima - the form used in Dante's Divine Comedy in which he talked with the dead and told their tangled, tortured histories.

John Haynes' snapshots of life in Nigeria and Patience's bar are often full of sharp, sensuous detail: ‘the fried / yam clicking in its oil as Mamma Ture/ bends village style down to her wide, black pans, / her toes spread out, her bum hoisted, her grey /logs nothing now but beards, the Peak Milk cans /with tugging wicks of cotton wool, the flare /of charcoal from the suya sellers' fans, /house-fronts swaying in fumes, through peppered air /the coloured lightbulbs rattling on your bar’. The sudden drama of the night attack on the Bar is vivid with sounds, smells and speech.

These pictures are constantly interwoven with musings on time, individual identity, political issues and colonialism. Sometimes, despite the fairly helpful notes, the writing is too involved and the jumps of thought too sudden to take me with him (as when he lurches into a riff on recorded Afro-music in canto 44). Sometimes individual Cantos stand alone as fine poems - c.20 on Gordimer's novel or c. 47 on John's dream of returning home.

The poem has been called 'one man's search for meaning in difficult times' but I see it as a search for the possibility of communication between entities across barriers - of Time, space, culture, even death.

Caroline Clark

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