Angol
Promenades charts the fragile crossings between homeland and elsewhere, where memory and migration converge. These poems inhabit spaces both intimate and unsettled, revealing a homeland at once tender and wounded, and a diaspora shaped by distance, promise, and the quiet weight of exile.
With measured clarity, Martins traces the fractures of identity in motion-where language holds fast to music and belonging resists easy resolution. Each poem becomes a passage through divided landscapes, alive with longing and return. Promenades is a meditation on memory, displacement, and the enduring human instinct to keep moving.
In Promenades, Ndubuisi Martins emerges as "a polytonal answersmith," writing poems that reverberate across geographies, histories, and hauntings of memory. Each page is charged with political, lyrical and personal urgency as he gathers language "in the back tree of memory," threading voices of Nigeria and Prague, ancestors and contemporaries, grief and light. This is a book of poems "full of songs, furious and frantic," where "truth is a dynamite" and "departure is presence." Martins' poems form a symphony of exile, resistance, and rebirth as he sculpts "songs we don't know we inherited by birth and dreams" into a deeply textured, border-crossing call-and-response that refuses silence and insists on singing.
Stephan Delbos, Former poet laureate of Plymouth, and author of Light Reading and Small Talk
...At this intersection of history and enactment, Martins reminds me of Gabriel Okara, who inaugurated the poetics of call-and-answer in exploring the personal and the planetary. In other words, Promenades is a book of its time, while also reaching back in time.
Henry Obi Ajumeze, Scholar, and author of Dimples on the Sand
