Now I Sing God into Stones, Oko Owi Ocho’s second poetry book, confirms the voice that was introduced to us in his erstwhile chapbook We Will Sing Water. Once again, Ocho’s speaker in these new poems inhabits a world shaped by history and its wounds. Poems on grief, poems on memory, poems on language, faith, history, loss, and displacement in varying iterations. Ocho makes his point very early in this work, mostly on rootedness, proclaiming in the epigraph: “a village song lurks inside my throat / I always look for home & history… / I sing gods into stones close to the river / my ancestors learn that music is closer to history than a cry.”
What Ocho does in this work is simple to say but difficult to execute—he makes grief sing. And in making it sing, he refuses to let it suffocate him. Grief and song, or grieving and singing, become two sides of the same coin. Song, after all, within an African cultural outlook, isn’t merely perfunctory. As Wole Soyinka wrote in Myth, Literature, and the African World View, “to speak of music and poetry in African ritual drama is to move beyond surface aesthetics into the deeper emotional and spiritual operations of the community. Music mediates history, morality, supplication, thanksgiving, and remembrance; it invokes divine presence and sustains communal meaning.” Song isn’t only for enjoyment. It can carry memory. It can call up deep feelings. It also evokes a sense of spiritual presence; in sacred places, music can make us feel the presence of the divine. This helps us understand Ocho’s poems. In them, song is not just background sound; it is a tool he uses to confront pain and define a sense of self.
In the poem “I saw the 90s without music,” he writes: “I knew songs of rivers [. . .] & in my chest bricked with ice / remained the creature’s dialect of grief.” Grief has a dialect and this dialect is song. When he says, “I am the boy carrying a village grief,” we understand at once that this grief is not just about one man’s sorrow. It is inherited. It is a matter of both personal and communal history, a matter of language, a matter of an entire race, because Ocho does not see grief as a private illness; he treats it as atmosphere. One of the strongest poems in the collection, the eponymous “Now I Sing God into Stones,” presents a confrontation between foreign belief and indigenous culture. The speaker recalls: “I rejected the crucifix when the priest, speaking Latin / & spicing Christ in harsh English vowels, asked me / to throw away my tongue / because it is tinted with the stains of my ancestor.” This is not a rejection of Christ. It is a rejection of erasure. The priest’s demand is not theological; it is colonial. And the poet’s response is daring. The speaker walks away “with the body of Christ inside my mouth.” Faith remains but identity, rooted in language, returns. This image alone bellies the weight of the collection, affirming the reclamation of what truly belongs to Ocho.
Thus, the question of memory remains central. In “What happens to words that do not speak?” Ocho answers quietly: “I write to inherit my history. / A history seized by silence.” Writing is inheritance. Singing is resistance to silence, as Ocho refuses to let his history be seized by the vicissitudes of life, such as having to migrate to places in search of greener pastures. Home will still call. The seventeen poems making the first part of the book converge to this one point.
And yet, this is not a book of despair. It is intense, yes. It is heavy. At times, grief almost feels overpowering, like a force that rules the speaker’s existence. But singing stands as counter-force. If grief presses down, song rises up. It is singing that helps the persona in this journey of recovery as seen in the poems, “rivulets we carry from history” (which speaks of the ontological connection of singing and self-consciousness), and “map to memories.” The latter poem can serve as anchor to the poems in the second part of the collection, which concerns itself with singing God into stones at the border of grief. It causes us to wonder why this eponymous poem does not fall within this category; the possible answer being that Ocho is more concerned with it being a decolonial monologue. It is important to note that this collection is constructed entirely at “the border of grief”; it is Ocho’s River of Babylon by which he sits to wail his losses—whether personal or communal.
This spotlights the cultural grounding of the collection in Idoma history and memory that gives it flesh. References to Apa and Kwararafa are not decorative. They contextualise the poems. But the local never feels small. It expands outward into a larger African consciousness. The third section, Epiphany of Gods Coming Home Through My Dreams, widens the scope. The motif of remembrance still prevails, as in the preceding poems. Three poems anchor the entire section: first, “the epiphanies are memories of home”; second, “we are tired of everything”; and third, “to save themself from the grip of forgetfulness.” To reconstruct these pieces, one can say that this remembering is crucial to avoid a forgetfulness of the self—it continues the grand mission of looking for home and history. It is tiredness that causes this grief, tiredness of bearing pains that defy naming; making singing the only way to make sense of this grief.
Yet for all its historical-cultural weight, the collection circles back to something intimate. In the final movement, love enters. After carrying “village grief” for so long, our poet opens himself “to the trick of passion.” And something shifts. Catharsis, in the old Aristotelian sense, happens not through argument but through affection. He confesses: “perhaps, my throat will find song / through the light you bring into it.” This is the turning point. The throat that carried grief now carries light. Song does not disappear, but it changes key. The poet who sang God into stones begins to discover that sometimes home is a person. History remains, but it is no longer the only weight. Grief and love have a common denominator, which is passion.
Not only in content, but also in its technical height, particularly in Ocho’s diction and style. The epigraph of each section bears a masterful use of language. In terms of stylistics, two aspects are relevant to highlight: because grief is central to this reading, I’ll point to breaking of words as reflective of the effect of grief. Take for instance: “I plan to dis mem ber my body,” as if to tell of how grief breaks a person; the spelling of “falling” as executed like something falling, in “my name fell from your mouth like rain”; and words like “a w a y” appear stretched across space; while “tiny” is written with typographic precision.
What is equally unique about this book is how Ocho’s influences come to bear in his articulation. In his decolonial embrace, which inform most of the poems—especially in the first, second, and third sections—one senses Achebe and Ngũgĩ; in the ritual elements and mythopoeia that recalls drama and ancestral communing, we see the influence of Soyinka; in taking to song and singing, Ocho brings to fore the Osundarean aesthetics he’s imbibed (this collection calls to mind Osundare’s Songs of the Marketplace, and Village Voices); and when he turns to the trick of passion and expresses it with melodious touch, we hear Pablo Neruda in the background.
Nevertheless, there are moments where the collection leans into repetition. Certain ideas recur in slightly altered forms. Perhaps grief itself repeats until it is heard properly. Equally notable, as highlighted by E. E. Sule, Ocho risks fronting his decolonial ideology at the detriment of allowing the poems speak by themselves: “While his ideological positioning appears to be a strength in his poetic art, it might likely undermine his craft unless, of course, he improves on the skill of hiding ideology in the enchanting eloquence of strung metaphors.” There are minor inconsistencies. The oscillation between “gods” and “God” can feel unstable, especially given the title. The third section, though ambitious, sometimes feels more declarative than the earlier intimate poems.
When it’s all being said and done, Ocho’s imagination is ecological in some sense. Grief is not just human. It is cosmic. The world mourns with us. Water runs through the collection as witness and participant. It swallows myths. It remembers crossings. Rivers sing. Owls mourn. Water carries memory. It is not surprising for a poet who “sings water.” To sing through grief is not to escape it. It is to refuse silence. Oko Owi Ocho has written a collection that insists on remembering: remembering language, ancestors, rivers, faith, and love. And in that remembering, he reminds us: no matter how far history scatters us, there is still a song that knows the way home.♦
Edited by
Edited by Carl Terver
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Izang Alexander Haruna is currently a postgrad in Philosophy of Education at the University of Jos, and in 2023 was shortlisted for the E.E. Sule/Sevhage Prize for African Literary Criticism. He is the author of Letters to 42 Writers (2024), and the chapbook In a Man’s Body (2025). His writing has appeared in The Nigeria Review, ANA Review, Nestle in the Rock Anthology (ANA Plateau), and Con-Scio, amongst others.