“The Arrival of Rain,” is a collection of 35 poems, written by Adedayo Agarau and published in 2020 by Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. The author, Adedayo Agarau, is a poet, documentary photographer and a graduate of Human Nutrition. He is a Wallace Stegner Fellow (2025) and a Cave Canem Fellow and a 2024 Ruth Lilly-Rosenberg Fellowship finalist.
The collection, The Arrival of Rain, is a slim book crafted on the framework of melancholy, and a pervasive echo of emptiness and self-searching.
In the collection, the poet’s persona seems heartbroken as he is once again left to lick his wounds of unreciprocated love. The poet draws upon the imagery of a broken door to describe the forlorn feeling one has as a result of repeated rejection. This is the sense that pervades the first poem in the work: “Look How Far I’ve Come.”
In this collection, the poet’s persona is somewhat unsettled and his mind befuddled with too many questions begging for clarity like a distressed moon in a blank sky. A sense of loneliness hovers above him as he perpetually attempts self-definition and understand his “self” in “the first portrait of me as Adedayo”: “let’s assume the body is an estrangement/a beach house washed up in a sea/the tender waves calling calling calling/let’s assume the body is a little flower/praying for the sun pleading to be left alone in the wind/alone with the stars in a night sky/alone with the grief trapped in the ship of its own sea/let’s assume the body is a departure.
It is in this same fashion that he writes the poems as portraits, as a medium of self-seeking, a poet trying to unravel what bothers and torments him. The poem “untitled” plays on paradoxes and its tendency to elude deeper meanings beyond the line. The paradoxes of “unhappinesses” and “helium balloons” and of sharing grief with the home keeper and yet never being at home to losses—they are laid out well. One of the most significant of the paradoxes in the collection is that of the mother being covered by a god betrayed by a sign of love; it brings to mind something about love: its power to redeem and disarm. It is even more haunting that the poem projects grief when it is really just love. In many ways, this could be said of the collection. Most of what it explores – self-seeking, empathy, heartbreak, spirituality – centred on deep intimacy, love.
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The Arrival of Rain discusses self-discovery, heartbreak, empathy, loneliness, and grief within the scope of spirituality, love and soul searching.
The final portrait poem is aptly titled: “Fifth Portrait as Adedayo, or As Just Any Other Child from this Country.”
In a final act of self-love and allusion to his title, Agarau asks us to “water the tree when [we] find the boy.” We are left both parched and satiated. We wonder who the boy is, how it is that he can still be missing, and what role we have played in the search. We ask if the boy is Nigeria, if his father is the bird perched on his tongue, if his body is still running. The author’s knack for the exploration of the urgency of absence is perpetually demonstrated.
In the work, the metaphor of the sea, of water is explored by the sense of floatation. In fact, the poet finds himself by the river and the accompanying imagery is that of drowning depression. For the poet, death lurks in the corner. Along with this sense of light-headed floatation, is the metaphor of rejection – an irredeemable reject- in a highly judgemental world.
Ultimately, the poems in this 46-page collection all draw the reader along the trajectory of an urgent journey of rejection, to drowning depression, to weightlessness, and to hope and freshness. The author is a deeply reflective writer, who perpetually fascinates the reader with his powerful deployment of potent metaphors to carry home his message.. Olatunbosun is a broadcast journalist, fact checker and book reviewer at Splash FM 105.5, Ibadan. He can be reached via 08023517565 (SMS and WhatsApp only), and email: molatunbosun@splashfm1055.com.
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