Each One a Furnace

By Tolu Oloruntoba

Each One a Furnace by Tolu Oloruntoba deftly explores themes of migration and diaspora in poems named for over 50 varieties of finch. While I expected these poems to flit between avian and human concerns, Oloruntoba draws on a wide frame of references, from Norse mythology to modern gaming and the work of contemporary artist Wangechi Mutu, creating a thoroughly modern and unique ecopoetics. 

With its attention to syllabics and forms such as haibun and nonet, Each One a Furnace offers many surprises. One particularly heartbreaking poem, “Waxbill / The Death of David Oluwale,” uses listing and dictionary-like definitions to weave together two disparate storylines, one about a species of finch from Nigeria, the other about a Nigerian immigrant who suffered abuse at the hands of two British officers linked to his death: 

What we know:

  1. The Black-rumped Waxbill, found in African grasslands sometimes landing further afield,
    is a bird of Least Concern:
    not a focus of species conservation.
    They do not qualify as threatened.
  2. The collective for a group of them, is a trembling;
  3.  A trembling:
    • David Oluwale in the hull of the SS Temple Bar
      […]

Elsewhere, repetition of the word “flinch” (a near homonym of finch) anchors considerations of the particular difficulties faced by migrating people, including experiences of familial estrangement and racism. In “Painted Bunting” we observe “[t]he solution” to the former as “the flinch of adult children on the phone,” while the speaker in the poem “Cutthroat” observes how passersby “clutch their bags / and flinch.” 

The range of poems included in this collection are evidence of how a constraint like “finches” can, with the right imagination, prove expansive. And with origins rooted in colonial empires, taxonomies are a fitting framework for these insightful meditations. In the “Notes and Attributions” section, Oloruntoba points to “the solitary deaths of finches that winters strand” from Dionne Brand’s book-length poem Ossuaries as the impetus for Each One a Furnace, noting, “[o]nce I saw those finches, I began to see them everywhere.”

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