Heiress publishes Michael Chiedoziem Chukwudera’s chapbook Painter of Love. Read a brief introduction to it by Carl Terver below. Scroll to the image at the end of the page to download the chapbook.
A young poet manages to still find the words to express love, this subject that some of us may imagine exhausting, or to have been exhausted with all possible metaphors. Reading Chukwudera’s Painter of Love reminded me—and will definitely remind anyone who has read that book—of Pablo Neruda’s 100 Love Sonnets, where Neruda, poem after poem, flows with an unending verse to the love of his life and would write these lines (in Sonnet III) which have remained indelibly printed in my mind: “…a ferocious love wound around / and around me—till it pierced me with its thorns, its sword, / slashing a seared road through my heart.”
Chukwudera’s love poems are not for a single lover, like Neruda’s, but a constellation of them, if we can count the few stars he casts as imageries in some of his poems. But it is a love feast nonetheless, and he invites us to paint with him.
Afapinen 