The Depiction of Loss, Grief and the Body in Gbenga Adesina’s Selected Poems in Painter of Water

Abstract

One of the phenomena and manifestations associated with grief and grieving is the use of poetry as a means of mourning the deceased. Over the centuries, poets have employed the instrumentality of poetry to express their grief at the loss of a loved one or an ideal. This chapter examines how Gbenga Adesina, a poet associated with the Nigerian confessional school of poetry, conveys his grief at the loss of his father in his poerty.The paper explores how he not only translates his experience of loss into an art form, but also, while reflecting upon his loss, provides us with insights into his selfhood in ways that extend far beyond himself. Drawing principally on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic framework for loss in his seminal essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917) and the pronouncements of other scholars on bereavement, this paper argues that Adesina.s poems can be read as a substantial discourse of literary response to the finiteness and unpredictability of human life on earth.The paper concludes that Adesina demonstrates in his poems not only how poetry can be used to process loss, but also how the body has become instrumental to the formation of contemporary subjectivities.