Hunting, haunting and haunted – A review of Jerry Chiemeke’s “The Colours In These Leaves”

By Ikechukwu Nwaogu

In his debut offering, a hybrid collection titled The Colours In These Leaves, Jerry Chiemeke boldly surfs the waters of loneliness, heartbreak, and depression, coming through with a forthrightness which can be mildly unsettling to a first time reader.

The book is divided into “Rooms”, which could as well stand for different epochs, if not in his life, in the creative process that spawned the book.

In Room One, he takes you on a journey in paragraphs, an unnerving walk along the corridors of his thought processes, through failed relationships, work induced depression, and the uncertainties of navigating life in a big city in the fledgling stages of post-academic adulthood.

Room Two is a tapestry in verse, told in a haunting, lonely voice, and much as a painting or tapestry on the wall is seen and not heard, we are let into a lot of bottled-up feeling, loneliness, sadness,  and pain, that has hung like curtains on the windows of a human mind. Love, in a myriad of forms, buoyant, unrequited, scorned, and a deep, poignant sadness run through this room like paint on the walls.

Room Three is more spiritual than the others, yelling at the idea of a god, a song of sorrow that even God seems not to care so much about, with all the problems the writer is facing.

These rooms go on and on, a sad song that would be boring and monotonous if it wasn’t such beautiful writing. Chiemeke lets us into his world, shows us his heart, his soul, and how haunted he is.

To read this collection of poetry, essays and musings is to know him, perhaps more intimately than most of us are comfortable with. The book is like a pane of glass, now transparent, now again reflective, and in looking at him through the glassy screens of our respective devices we are afforded brief, uncomfortable glimpses of what may be us, could be us, is us.

In this book, there is a lot of sadness, anger, and a feeling of being forsaken, but no one can accuse the author  of being dishonest.

The Colours In These Leaves will stand out to the truly introspective, mainly because of its depth, and the haunting, unabashed baring of Chiemeke’s soul that can be found within the pages.