Review of J.Y. Frimpong's THE QUIETIST by Abeiku Arhin Tsiwah

Title: The Quietest
Author: J.Y. Frimpong
Genre: Poetry
Pages: 48
Publisher: Self Publishing
Reviewer: Abeiku Arhin Tsiwah

Whenever I read a single poem, I mean a poem without a home, I read it as a therapist working on the anxiety of a broken child. But whenever I read a poem waking up in other poems' ambiances — a collection or carefully collected book of poems — I read it like a surgeon performing series of meticulous surgery on a neoplasm. That way, I am able to associate the latter through events, sounds, taste, smell, feel, and waterfall that breaks on every poem — an attempt to find clarity of thoughts, patterns and the kind of linkage which hooks each poem after the next.

"The Quietest" is J.Y. Frimpong's latest, 2018, poetry book on sale and making the needed waves it merits. The poet describes "The Quietest" as a human [a wo(man)] whose body can be expressed through the sound of love, the heart of separation and everything negative and yet at the end it is poetry that holds these pieces of breakages together, holding them like scares in the hearts — like dreams in the mind — like a golden medallion won or lost at an Olympic. 

Although it is made up of 48 pages but technically, it could be realized that it is a total of 41 pages of pristine poetry consumption; 38 good poems/a bonus. The Quietest comes with it a surprising shape and twist, perhaps, a not so kind of the odd imaginableness that the usual J.Y. Frimpong's works would put the readership through. This bouquet of fine threaded poems piece themselves together so well that one thinks these poems could have been written at a sitting, within a specific time lapse. 

Opening with, 'Locked Door', pg 3

The day I finally understood that

Your heart was a locked door 

With it key missing . . .

It gleams through folds of events expressed as the brokenness of a lover whose ideal love couldn't be attained, irrespective of the many attempts he might have made towards that. I do wonder why J.Y. Frimpong would choose to begin this masterpiece with a poem like this which touches on so many subjects and themes that is always present with us: humans and the turn of their relationships. Though beautiful, every man or woman who has passed through this experience as recounted in such didactic terse language would bear with the poet and his outburst of sentiments. It begins with an obscured hope but ends in a oblique sombre.

....I moved on 

And told myself 

Never would I allow love to make me so little

Beyond this opening poem lies layers of well swimming poems: Home, Midnight Thoughts, The Partitioning of Our Music, Ever Doubtful, Memory, A New Year's Happiness.... But 'Memory' strikes me the more. Although these poems have their strong shifts depending on the reader and the experiences that the readership comes into harmony with these poems, Memory takes on me with the strongest shift.

— Memory, pg 12

Each year I wonder how beautiful she has grown
How many boys have walked her skin in their dreams
I wonder how long her hair is
I wonder what her favourite nail polish is....

What else can be more beautifully taken and tear streaming than such poignant memory that strikes the core of the heart and explodes the duct of the eyes to travel in sobs? That is how powerful this poem is. That is how breathtaking this poem can be. A poem that haunts your memory if you have ever gone through such an experience before: broken home, a failed attempt at loving someone; the lost of half yourself (which the poet calls his sister). Wondering where she might have been and what pains or form she might gone through.

Ever thought of how to save your love? I guess there are thousands of literatures written on that subject. But how true have those literatures made you to believe in a dying love? Do you ever wonder how to save a whirl from the wind? How to save a moon from the lynch of darkness? Then 'Sherry And Ann' from The Quietest has the possible answers you might be looking for. Answers that presses the pertinence of issues you would be quite surprised of.

— Sherry And Ann, pg 15

This photo makes me dream
Of how I want us to be
You looking at me
As I tell you word for word
What you really mean to me....

But I am wondering why the poet didn't begin this collection with Sherry And Ann. It holds the breath of The Quietest. It is perhaps the most related poem to the central idea as expressed by the cover photo of the book. Maybe it is the flaw of love itself in trying to find which rightful wing to fly on.

One cannot talk about this book without holding their jaws in the mirror with the gleefulness of 'Thorns Passing As Flowers' and the philosophical evoking truce of 'Reminder' and 'The Magician'.

— Thorns Passing As Flowers, pg 26 

Who gave you the permission 

To be this way with people 

To let them dream of shooting stars 

In the sky only to drop them to their knees 

And still 

expect flowers to bloom in your heart?....

— Reminder, pg 35 

Why did God create night, day, moon and the sun? ..../ 

God created these things just to constantly remind us that 

Were failing 

— The Magician, pg 41 

You are the magician 

Every time we fight a little 

Tears storms out and 

We die a little inside . . .

Apart from the structural string that came with the book's formating, 'The Quietest' is an illustrious mark of its own. It is a masterpiece that paces through wittingly admirable diction and imageries. This poetry collection from a contemporary Ghanaian poet, J.Y. Frimpong is a classic that can compete globally with any kind of poetry material that is recognized as a tour de force in the literature world. The Quietest is simply a spark! 

NB: The Reviewer, Abeiku Arhin Tsiwah considers himself in two worlds: earth & (or) sperm — and water or & [spirit] of Cape Coast fatherhood— & the everyday Ghanaian.