Through five poetry collections – Feet of the Limping Dancers (1987), Toward the Aerial Zone (1988), Voices from Deep Water (1997), The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems (2002) and Of the Deepest Shadows and the Prisons of Fire (2010) – Chimalum Nwankwo charts a visionary course as he foregrounds the art of memory or the dynamic relationship between memory and renewal. Nwankwo describes himself as ‘an Igbo poet writing in English’, but his affective poetic truths are applicable beyond a specific socio-cultural context as part of a human narrative about metaphorical blindness and timeless insight. His second poetry collection, Toward the Aerial Zone, which is the main focus of this essay, particularly accentuates Nwankwo's poetics.

The group of Nigerian poets sometimes referred to as the post- Civil War poets – Pol Ndu, Niyi Osundare, Chimalum Nwankwo, Odia Ofeimun and their cohort – aspired, in different ways, to create new poetic visions for a nation (and world) troubled by human disasters caused by multiple factors including colonial reductionism and postcolonial anomie. One of the techniques of the post-Civil War poets was to heighten certain kinds of affective poetic insights. Discussing ‘the Nsukka axis’ (as distinct from ‘the Ibadan axis’) of this group, Funso Aiyejina points out that, ‘as a reaction to the orgy of blood consequent on the massacres and the Civil War’, the poetry of ‘this cluster of poets’ has been ‘threnodic both in tone and content’ (Recent Nigerian Poetry in English: An Alter-Native Tradition’: 115). With his first poetry collection, Feet of the Limping Dancers, published in 1987, Nwankwo signalled his affinity with this group as a culturally conscious universalist who believes in affective poetic truths. Though a self-described ‘Igbo poet writing in English’ (The Womb in the Heart and Other Poems: xii), the truth that he often focuses on – the dynamic relationship between memory and renewal – is applicable beyond a specific socio-cultural context as part of a human narrative about metaphorical blindness and timeless insight. The bridging of distance (between is and should, between worlds and temporalities, between speech and song) through memory and vision is a key aspect of Nwankwo's poetry of the aerial zone, and almost every poem seems to trace a rhetorical path back to the first poem, ‘Bush Dirge’, in his first poetry collection, Feet of the Limping Dancers.