SOURCE: "Epitaph to Christopher Okigbo," in Africa Today, Vol. 14, No. 6, December, 1967, pp. 22-3.

Povey is an English educator, critic, and the editor of African Arts. In the following excerpt, he surveys Okigbo's works, highlighting the poet's lyricism and praising his wide emotional range and subject matter.

Okigbo was a far-ranging writer, eclectic, with a poetic strength which moulded the apparently piecemeal sources of his inspiration into a personal and sensitive vision. He is acknowledged as an intellectual poet, making the fullest statement through rigidly cerebral images that recall inevitably that old imagist master, Ezra Pound. Yet this assertion may exaggerate Okigbo's difficulty and make us underrate the tenderness that flecks his work and that directness of vision which takes beauty as its aim. There is an immediate loveliness in the half jocular spring image of:

      when the draper of May
      has sold out fine green
      garments; and the...