SOURCE: "Speaking for Africa," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4646, April 17, 1992, p. 8.

In the following review, Foden presents a mixed assessment of An African Elegy, questioning the collection's relevance for non-Africans since "every poem contains an exhortation to climb out of the African miasma."

In an essay in the Guardian in August 1990, Ben Okri wrote of how the suffering of the oppressed could make them farmers of their dreams. "Their harvest could make the world more just and more beautiful. It is only the oppressed who have this sort of difficult and paradoxical responsibility." Dreams are the currency of Okri's writing, particularly in this first book of poems, An African Elegy, but also in his books of short stories and Booker Prizewinning novel The Famished Road.

Okri's dreams are made on the stuff of Africa's colossal economic and political problems, and reading the poems is to experience a...