Cathedral of Faith review: Chidera Echedom’s Debut Looks for Grace in Everyday Life

Nigerian poet Chidera Echedom released her poetry book, Cathedral of Faith, in October through Witsprouts, as part of its ongoing Continuity Poetry Book Series.

There is a line toward the end of the book that softly summarises the book. The world, she says, will wait for her to finish her laundry, playlist and unfinished poem because concluding things “while doing the things we love most” is a blessing we often overlook. It’s a domestic theology that flows through Cathedral of Faith. The poems aren’t particularly interested in doctrines. The God in the poems appears, in the silence, in peeled lemons and held doors, in the woman who walks into a room and warms it.

Form precedes theme in announcing the collections objectives. The book begins with a ghazal, a pantoum and a villanelle in succession. She clearly enjoys the art of repetition, the way a pantoum’s recycled words can make an argument feel like a tide coming in. “Pantoum for Joy” is the most powerful of these with its refrain about the stillness of love and the stillness of prosperity gaining significant momentum. When the forms work, it’s because the repetition resembles faith itself: the words repeated until you believe it. When they don’t, the seams show. A borrowed structure might give a poem a feeling it didn’t quite deserve.

The devotion to women, rather than the scaffolding, is what ties the collection together. The opening “Ghazal for Women” introduces the concept of women as light, grace and the hands God leaves the world in, and Echedom returns to this tone enough that it forms the collections spine. She excels at the unseen work of caring: a poem about holding someone who is healing which warns against trying to fix a person too quickly is one of the most insightful pieces here. Elsewhere she relies on Glennon Doyle and Michelle Obama as epigraphs. The impact is double-edged: it gives the latter poems a vocabulary of self-liberation but it also nudges them toward the register of affirmation, where hard-won insight might flatten into something you might read on a tote bag

That is the books recurring risk. Echedom writes beautifully about thirst and drought. “Before every Rain was Drought” builds a dread out of its accumulating ands, war and hunger and death pressing in on a child’s world. But she tends to resolve her darker poems a touch too neatly, often on the word “Ameen,” as if every ache must be answered before the page turns. The griefs are frequently more interesting than the consolations. When she lets an image sit without tidying it. A glass shattering into “a dance” a free woman spelling out the word spread down the page letter by letter. You feel a sharper stranger poet underneath the reassuring one.

Still there’s something disarming about a debut body of work open about optimism. Echedom, a writer who has allegedly travelled through 40 countries and discovered poetry through Adichie, Nwapa and Achebe writes as someone who has intentionally sought grace. The poems are dedicated to her father, with an Igbo line wishing him back as her father in another life and that private compassion gives the book’s collective ‘we’ warmth. Cathedral of Faith is uneven, oftentimes too sweet for its own good but it is also generous and sincere a debut that knows exactly what it likes.

Cathedral of Faith by Chidera Echedom is published by Witsprouts. To support the series order your copy, at books.witsprouts.com.