This is a work of historical witness, exposing grief and trauma with sensitivity and poetic creativity. Wariboko, in lines of austere beauty, has produced Biafran war narratives of sublime emotional power. Songs of Childhood provides a fresh minority-group access to the brutal reality and human fragility of the 1967-70 Nigerian civil war. The stories are true, and this poetry collection differs from the familiar in the annals of war narratives.

 “This slim corpus of poems is an explosive dynamite! A dynamite that explodes, exposing chilling glimpses of hushed aspects of the untold cruelties inflicted on the marginalized ethnic groups….  The disruptive syntax in some poems conveys the dislocation of a-once peaceful, orderly world suddenly jolted into chaos, trepidation and turmoil. In the same vein, the terse telegraphic style translates, graphically, the abruptness, the brusqueness, and the sense of immediacy urged by the spontaneous flow of creative impulse in anxious moments of crisis and turbulence.”

Adiyi-Martin T. Bestman, Professor of French Literature, poet and literary critic. Writer-in-Residence, University of Port Harcourt.

“Nimi Wariboko makes the reader relive the Biafran war days and his childhood in an enchanting manner. Now far removed from childhood and the war days, the poet’s nostalgia and anxiety come to play in his poetic lines which recount the experience. The diction is simple and fully captures the innocence of childhood fraught with perils of a war foisted on the poet and his people. The language is fresh, and the images of war are innocent but life-threatening. Songs of Childhood: Biafran Memories is a major contribution to the poetry of childhood, civil war, and human existence. It flows like a river whose currents are sometimes disturbed by debris but whose progress is inevitable.”

Tanure Ojaide, poet and scholar, the Frank Porter Graham Professor of Africana Studies, University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“The poems, rendered through the eyes and sensibility of a child, are haunting and powerful. Songs of Childhood reminds me of Uwem Akpan’s novel, New York, My Village, in its recreation of the unique experience of the peoples of the Niger Delta (being buffeted by Biafran and Federal troops during the war). There’s lore and gore aplenty in this tender and heartrending poetic harvest. The reader is often spellbound by the sullied innocence and harried urgency of the poems’ narrator-persona. Kudos to Wariboko for deploying the idiom of poetry to enflesh these memories.”

Okey Ndibe, author of Foreign Gods, Inc.