Gbenga Adesina’s Death Does Not End at the Sea Reviewed by Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
by Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri
Gbenga Adesina. Death Does Not End at the Sea. University of Nebraska Press.
In recent African and diasporic poetry, the sea has become a charged site of memory, carrying the weight of migration, displacement, loss, and historical rupture. Gbenga Adesina’s debut collection, Death Does Not End at the Sea, enters this field with a work that is at once elegy and migratory narrative. The collection traces journeys across continents and generations while insisting that these movements are never clean departures but ongoing negotiations with history.
The book opens with “Glory,” a litany that establishes one of its central gestures: the sanctification of both life and decay. The repeated invocation, “Glory of plums, femur of Glory… Glory of the Latin / of the dead and their grammar / composed entirely of decay,” renders language itself as a site where the living and the dead meet. The phrase “grammar composed entirely of decay” is especially telling: Adesina frames death not as silence, but as a system of meaning, a language that continues to structure experience. This opening gesture prepares the reader for a collection where absence is never empty but charged with presence.
This presence is most intimately felt in the recurring figure of the father. In “I Carried My Father Across the Sea,” the speaker bears the dead father through water in an image that is at once surreal and emotionally precise: “He was light to carry, / his burdens and vows had bled out of him. // He was heavy / with the responsibility of the dead.” The contradiction here is not merely descriptive but conceptual. The father’s body is no longer physically burdened, yet it carries the full symbolic weight of lineage, memory, and obligation. The poem offers a striking assertion: “Death is not silence. / It is where I hear you most clearly.” This collapses the presumed boundary between life and death and reframes grief as an intensified mode of listening.
The sequence “Coma” extends this meditation through fragmentation and repetition. As the father lies dying, the poem attempts to name the experience of approaching death through a litany of definitions: “The silence is of IV tubes and veins… / The silence is the silence of blood.” This repetition does not clarify silence but multiplies it. It suggests that grief resists singular articulation. Silence becomes almost tactile, distributed across the body and its medical apparatus. When the speaker asks, “Father, is a book a stone of silence?” the question gestures toward the limits of language itself. The poem implies that writing is both an attempt to preserve and an acknowledgment of what cannot be fully held.
If the father anchors the emotional core of the collection, the central sequence, “Death Does Not End at the Sea,” expands its scope into a collective and historical dimension. Here, Adesina turns toward contemporary migration across the Mediterranean, invoking both present crises and the longer shadow of the Middle Passage. The sequence opens with an imperative: “Look. You must look. You cannot / look away.” This direct address positions the reader as witness. It refuses the distance that often accompanies representations of suffering.
Throughout the sequence, Adesina relies on stark, arresting images. Bodies “curve darkly and arrow down into the water,” and objects on the shore, including “a yellow scarf” and “the phone of a dead woman / ringing in the white sand,” stand in for interrupted lives. These images resist narrative closure; instead, they accumulate into a field of loss that cannot be resolved. Yet the sequence also insists on the persistence of voice. In moments of crisis, “those who drown cry out… / The language inside us,” suggesting that even at the edge of death, language emerges as a final assertion of presence.
The choral refrains further complicate the relationship between faith and suffering: “The children of God are upon frightened waters / and God being hunger… moves among his people and does not spare them.” In this, divinity is not a source of comfort but an unsettling force, implicated in the very conditions of suffering. The repetition of this refrain mirrors the cyclical nature of migration and loss, reinforcing the sense that these histories are ongoing rather than concluded.
Interwoven with these sequences are the “In Search of James Baldwin” poems, which extend the collection into a transnational Black literary and spiritual geography. Baldwin functions not simply as a subject but as a method of seeing. In Paris, the speaker asks his son, “What do you see?” while standing before a painting, foregrounding perception as an ethical act. Later, in Istanbul and Senegal, Baldwin’s presence becomes a way of navigating questions of exile, belonging, and artistic inheritance.
These poems also explore the tension between protection and exposure. In Senegal, when confronted with the history of the island of Gorée, the speaker attempts to shield his son: “I reached out my hand and clasped it around my son’s eyes… but it was too late. He had seen it.” The moment captures the impossibility of fully mediating historical knowledge. To see is to inherit, and inheritance here is inseparable from trauma.
A significant formal feature of the collection is its use of repetition and revision. In the later poem “Gorée,” earlier images are reimagined into a counterfactual vision: “Children never drowned or died face down in black dirt.” This revision does not erase the historical reality established earlier in the book; instead, it exposes the desire to undo it. By presenting an impossible alternative, Adesina highlights both the violence of history and the limits of imaginative repair.
Across the collection, Adesina’s language moves between the lyrical and the incantatory, often building intensity through repetition. Lines such as “The fruit of ocean is ocean” and “On the sea, prayer” function as refrains that repeat across poems, creating a sense of continuity and return. At the same time, the work remains grounded in specific, tangible details, including hospital rooms, subway stations, markets, shorelines, ensuring that its larger philosophical concerns remain anchored in lived experience.
Death Does Not End at the Sea ultimately proposes a poetics of continuity. The dead persist within the living; history remains active in the present; the sea connects rather than separates. Yet this continuity is not consolatory. It demands a sustained engagement with grief, loss, displacement, and the struggle to survive. In bringing together personal elegy and collective history, Adesina’s debut offers a powerful meditation on what it means to carry the past forward—and to listen for it in the present.
Daniel Naawenkangua Abukuri (he/him) is a Ghanaian poet and prose writer. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, Berkeley Poetry Review, Transition Magazine, The Malahat Review, Chestnut Review, Decolonial Passage, Orion Magazine, Colorado Review, North American Review and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, the BREW Poetry Award, and the 2026 Caine Prize. He is the winner of the 2025 African Writers Award for Poetry and Poetry Archive Now! Wordview 2025, finalist for the 2025 Adinkra Poetry Prize, and the runner-up for the 2026 Cambridge Poetry Prize. He is an Obsidian Foundation Fellow and was featured in the Obsidian Foundation Showcase with The Poetry Society.