8 - Poetry and war: Beware Soul Brother and Other Poems

Summary

Achebe's collection of short fiction and prose pieces covered a period of twenty years, tracing his development and changing preoccupations as a writer. His volume of poetry, on the other hand, spans a much shorter period and is unified by its focus on the civil war and the physical, social and psychological consequences of that war. Most of the poems were first published in Nigeria in 1971 under the title Beware Soul Brother and were written over a period of four years during the civil war and its immediate aftermath. The first collection contained twenty-three poems; a second revised edition, containing thirty poems grouped under a series of headings, was published a year later by Heinemann Educational Books in London under the same title and won the newly established Commonwealth Poetry Prize. It is this revised and restructured edition that I will discuss.

The collection is grouped under five sections which, Achebe says in his preface, ‘suggested themselves to my mind’: Prologue; Poems About War; Poems Not About War; Gods, Men and Others; Epilogue. Some poems are dated, others not, but it is clear that the poems are not grouped in the order in which they were written. Thus the first two poems are dated 1971, the third, 1968. As with all of Achebe's works, the placing of particular pieces is rarely unplanned; each poem and each group of poems bears some relation to the one that precedes it.