Ekphrasis and Visual Art in Niyi Osundare’s Poetry

This study examines the use of ekphrasis, the literary description and evocation of visual art works, in the poetry of Niyi Osundare, one of Nigeria's foremost contemporary poets and a foundational figure in the development of a politically engaged African ecopoetics. Osundare is widely discussed for his nature imagery, Marxist political commitments, and Yoruba oral poetic inheritance, but his engagement with the visual arts and the specific rhetorical and philosophical functions that ekphrastic passages serve in his poetry have not received the focused critical attention they merit. The study applies ekphrasis theory and close reading to a selection of twenty poems from Osundare's collections Village Voices, Waiting Laughters, and The Eye of the Earth that contain significant engagements with painting, sculpture, or traditional visual art forms. Analysis attends to the relationship between the verbal and the visual in these poems, the specific artworks or art traditions Osundare invokes, and the ways in which ekphrastic passages function within the broader political and ecological arguments of each collection. Findings reveal that Osundare's ekphrasis is predominantly oriented towards traditional Yoruba and broadly African visual art, and that his ekphrastic passages serve to assert the aesthetic and philosophical richness of African visual traditions against colonial dismissal while also using visual art as a metaphor for the poet's own craft. The study contributes to undergraduate appreciation of the relationship between poetry and the visual arts in African literary modernism. Keywords: ekphrasis, Niyi Osundare, Yoruba poetry, visual art, African ecopoetics.