The Woodlot

By Chris Banks

I am the city falling into the sea. 
But there remain acolytes in me, 
singing in the cathedrals,

From the poem “Re-Claim”

These are the first lines of the first poem in Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba, a poetry collection out this Spring with M&S , and Oloruntoba is a poet I have been following closely since reading a poem by him in American Poetry Review.

Unravel is a book I had to read multiple times, and I’m not sure I understand everything the poet Oloruntoba is saying in this book, but Oloruntoba has written an ambitious collection in terms of wordplay, and how the individual poems dissect his personal identity as poet, father, immigrant; and at least for me, the real gift of this collection is its wealth of history and allusions and old stories. I think Tolu Oloruntoba in Unravel is constructing his own personal myth–one he can live with.

One of my favourite poems of Oloruntoba’s collection is entitled “Contronym” which appears early in the collection, and the wordplay, the language riffing on everything from Faust and Foist, village and villain, Koan and Kháos, really had me smiling. But the first poem I have excerpted for this particular review is the first section of a poem called “Dismantle” as I loved the cataloguing of images and piling on of history, of geological time, in order to really illustrate the mess we are making of the environment:  

i. I DRINK IT UP

I’ve been curing my confusion since birth. Flesh. Salt. Smoke. 
Jerk. I disagree with the sedimentation of the world into 
the trinity of genes, memes, and toxins, magnified.
Geologic time knew what to do with the plumage of t-rexes,

with primordial colors now lost us. Could it capture 
the energy in our leavings, and carbon-based sadness? 
Wanting to compute odds of safety on the planet, 
I keep thinking of the plankton-to-pipeline pipeline;

not those lizards we think became petrol. Open the metallic 
wrap of the present, and its styrene cradle. So many landfills, 
where aluminum can slumber in 100-year countdown 
on the bottom bunk. Cities lie above, in valleys that mountains

of compacted trash days make. Mine those. So much 
could come of the 2-week round trips of train tickets; 
14-month ropes, milk cartons that rest after 5 years, 
and fishing lines that could bite the dust in 600.

The 7 human lifetimes of diapers thus seem appropriate, 
somehow. What could the sludge that seeps beneath 
the pile be becoming? In the unlikely event that there are 
humans that survive us, what will the milkshake straws

of their oilrigs vacuum, to burn again? I have found comfort 
in the non-infinity of garbage. The earth was always likely
to outlast us, and now, our misdeeds. The last enemy 
that will be destroyed is death. But before that, styrofoam,

tinfoil, and reactor cores are forever.

This poem is emphatically pointing to the fact that somewhere in “the plankton-to-pipeline pipeline” humans lost their way, and much of the present anxiety over landfills can be assauged by remembering how old the earth is, and that it will outlast our garbage, and our misdeeds.

Another poem “Demonstro” was a favourite of mine because I thing it really encapsulates the poet Oloruntoba’s intense seeking, yearning, to make one’s life, his life, truly meaningful and that is a feeling I connect powerfully with:   

Demonstro

I show, you show our affliction. We 
who are at our most human when 
we are yearning. My Cain-mark, your 
Cain-mark, shows even, especially 
in this gropesome dark. And because 
longing is never satisfied, it takes a village 
away, to have ours be so vulgar. 
Saudade, sehnsucht are beautiful 
only in theory. People need us 
to keep the keening to ourselves. 
Scientists found the four words 
at the core of all our language:
“GOOD,” “WANT,” “BAD,” “LOVE.”
And we found belonging to be 
the only bandage for longing, 
we great apes who keep trying, 
the kind of gambler 
this casino loves.

This whole poem is remarkable, but it is the last eight lines which I have been thinking about all morning as I write this, the idea that every language, if you were to cut it into a core sample, wants to communicate the same things: what is good and bad about lived experience, and what all people want is love and belonging.   

So far, I have chosen poems which are fairly easy to parse into meaning, but the poet Oloruntoba plays with a lot of various poetic structures in this book, and the litany of fresh lines and deep-cut allusions that left me gasping will have you racing to an online search engine. He makes various allusions to the American poet Franz Wright and the Nigerian children’s author Kola Onadipe, SSRIS found in drinking water, the Tower of Babel, Disney’s Fantasia 2000 as horror story, the angel Azâzêl and Prometheus, Alkebu-Lan (which is the oldest name for Africa that exists) and Doctor Livingstone, climate change, and on and on the cataloguing of people and things goes. 

I said earlier I thought Tolu Oloruntoba was attempting to construct a personal myth, one he can negotiate and live with, and how do you do that if your anxieties are shadowed by mountains of styrofoam in the present, or if you are navigating life between continents, different stages of life, different selves? 

In a poem called “Of Passwords Stronger Than 4 Words With 1,000 Iterations”, the poet Oloruntoba I think, at least for me, answers this very question:

I’d thought hatred would save me; 
then I thought love would save me, 
before I thought poetry would save me.

There is something so right, so pure, so preternaturally truth for me about these three lines. The secret hope of all poets is that once you realize not your parents, nor the angels in their high bower, are going to save us, our redemption might just come from poetry, our own attempts to make our lives meaningful. And what poetic lines! For example, “Love may explode the brain’s drug lab / but let us surrender to the instincts of the animal / the saltlick of the other’s skin makes of us.”

Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba out now with M & S  Spring 2025 is a fascinating poetry collection full of new discoveries and treasured lines , and although I cannot say I unraveled all of its depths, I really admire the poet’s ambition as if self identity was a city “falling into a sea”, and still there are acolytes and myriad allusions singing in the vaulted cathedrals we try to build of our poems. Please go read Unravel by Tolu Oloruntoba by purchasing a copy at your local bookstore!

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Bonfires was also a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry in Canada. His poetry has appeared in The New Quarterly, Arc Magazine, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Malahat Review, The Walrus, American Poetry Journal, The Glacier, Best American Poetry (blog), Prism International, among other publications. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives with dual disorders–chronic major depression and generalized anxiety disorder– and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.