Long before this debut, Adeola Akinremi built a reputation as a journalist committed to telling difficult truths from the frontlines of Nigeria’s political and social realities. With ‘Scattered Ground’, he turns to poetry to explore the emotional terrain behind those stories, transforming years of reportage into reflective verse that meditates on displacement, power, climate crisis and the fragile search for belonging in a fractured world. In this report, Sunday Ehigiator gives a review of the recently launched work of literature.
In journalism, the writer is often constrained by facts, deadlines and the discipline of objectivity. Poetry, however, offers a different terrain; one where emotion, memory and moral reflection find fuller expression. With ‘Scattered Ground,’ award-winning Nigerian journalist Adeola Akinremi crosses that boundary with a debut collection that reflects both the rigour of reportage and the contemplative depth of lyric writing.
For readers familiar with Akinremi’s career in the newsroom, the move into poetry may appear unexpected, especially when it comes from someone with a deep background in investigations. Yet, as the poems in ‘Scattered Ground’ reveal, the impulse to interpret the world has always been central to his work, especially as a former features editor of THISDAY Newspaper.
Safe to say, Journalism told the stories; poetry now explores the emotional and philosophical aftermath of those stories.
Poetry of Witness
At its core, ‘Scattered Ground’ is poetry shaped by witness. Akinremi’s career as a reporter and public policy practitioner has taken him across continents, and the poems bear the imprint of those journeys. Conflicts, migration, climate change and the pressures of governance form the thematic architecture of the collection.
These are not abstract themes. Rather, they are rendered through a voice that has observed the lived realities behind headlines: communities uprooted by environmental disasters, citizens navigating broken political systems, and individuals searching for identity in a rapidly shifting world.
In many ways, the poems extend the moral concerns that have long defined Akinremi’s journalism. Where a news report may record the displacement of a community, a poem allows the writer to explore the psychological residue of such displacement: grief, memory and longing.
The Metaphor of the Title
The title, ‘Scattered Ground,’ serves as the central metaphor of the collection. It evokes a world fractured by historical forces; colonial legacies, environmental crises, political instability and global migration. The ‘scattered ground’ becomes both geographic and emotional: a continent whose resources are dispersed, societies struggling to hold themselves together, and individuals navigating fragmented identities.
This metaphor resonates strongly in an era where mobility, voluntary or forced, has become one of the defining features of modern life.
The title ‘Scattered Ground’ also functions both as a metaphor and a thesis. It evokes a fractured world: continents divided by inequality, societies fragmented by power struggles, and individuals displaced by forces beyond their control.
Migration, both literal and psychological, runs through the collection. The poems often speak from the perspective of someone who has travelled between worlds, carrying the memory of home while navigating unfamiliar landscapes. In this sense, Akinremi captures a defining condition of contemporary African experience: the tension between rootedness and displacement.
There is also a persistent ecological consciousness. Climate change, desertification, flooding, and environmental injustice appear not as abstract policy debates but as lived realities affecting communities already vulnerable to political neglect.
Echoes of Eliot, Shadows of Clark
Akinremi’s poetic sensibility is shaped by two significant literary personalities. He openly acknowledges the influence of T. S. Eliot and J. P. Clark-Bekederemo in his literary formation.
From Eliot comes the modernist awareness of fragmentation and the search for meaning in a fractured world, a sensibility famously captured in The Waste Land; the sense that modern life must be expressed through broken images and layered voices. From Clark comes the grounding in Nigerian landscapes and political history, where rivers, storms, villages, and earth often mirror the emotional currents of society.
The interplay of these influences gives Scattered Ground a distinctive texture: modernist in tone and structure, yet deeply rooted in African emotions, experiences, and political geography.
Journalism’s Quiet Afterlife
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the collection is how it transforms the discipline of journalism into poetic reflection. The journalist observes; the poet interprets. In Akinremi’s work, the two roles coexist.
His lines often carry the clarity of a reporter’s notebook but unfold into meditations on power, displacement and human dignity. The poems become spaces where the emotional truths behind public events are allowed to surface.
In this sense, Scattered Ground can be read as the emotional archive of stories that could never be fully told within the constraints of news reporting. The book, therefore, reads like the emotional archive of stories that journalism cannot fully contain.
A Tradition of Writer-Editors
Akinremi’s entry into poetry places him within a tradition of journalists and editors who have found a second voice in verse. The movement between newsroom and verse is not accidental: both are attempts to interpret the human condition, though in different languages.
In Nigeria, the example of J. P. Clark-Bekederemo remains particularly instructive. Clark himself worked as a journalist before becoming one of the defining voices of modern African literature, demonstrating that reportage and poetry can share a common moral foundation.
With this collection, Akinremi joins a small but notable tradition of editors and journalists who have turned to poetry as a parallel form of expression. In Scattered Ground, the poet does not abandon the reporter; he expands him.
A Debut of Reflection and Reckoning
As a debut, ‘Scattered Ground’ is ambitious in scope and thoughtful in tone. It grapples with large themes: governance, war, climate, migration, while remaining attentive to the intimate human experiences behind them.
The collection does not seek easy consolation. Instead, it invites readers to reflect on the fractured realities of contemporary life and the ways individuals attempt to find meaning within them.
In doing so, Akinremi reminds us that the work of witnessing does not end with the news story. Sometimes it continues in quieter, more enduring forms; in the reflective language of poetry.
Verdict
‘Scattered Ground’ announces Akinremi as a poet whose work emerges from the intersection of journalism, public policy and literary imagination. The collection demonstrates how a writer shaped by the urgency of news can turn to poetry not as escape, but as a deeper mode of engagement with the world.
For readers interested in contemporary Nigerian writing and in the enduring dialogue between journalism and literature, ‘Scattered Ground’ is a debut that invites careful attention.
The collection is a thoughtful and ambitious debut that situates itself at the intersection of literature, politics and moral witness. It is not a collection seeking easy consolation. Rather, it confronts the fractured terrain of the contemporary world and insists that poetry still has a role in helping us understand it.
For a writer whose career has long been defined by telling difficult truths, Akinremi’s transition to poetry feels not only natural but inevitable.
In the end, ‘Scattered Ground’ reminds us that the work of witnessing does not end with the news story. Sometimes, it continues in the quiet, enduring language of the poem.
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