"The masterful wedding of the narrative and the lyric in these poems (whose subject is the maturation of a sensibility, the coming-of-age of a young Englishwoman--the power of her ties to family, husband and her 'adopted' country, Nigeria--as well as the illumination of her own soul and that of the narrator's) fills the reader with both sorrow and wonder. It is an instructive tale for our age--its vision of the individual will and imagination resisting the madness of politics and the destruction of war is singular and profound."

--Carol Muske-Dukes