By Babatunde Adeleke
The title of Philip Muoghalu’s first 46-page poetry collection, ‘The Things We Feel’, is almost defiantly plain. Fifteen sections follow: death, love, anger, fear, sadness, joy, cold, food, marriage, politics, relocation, friendship, mother, banking, family. It looks, at first glance, like a catalogue. What you get instead is something narrower and more useful: the interior weather of a Nigerian man who has moved continents, become a father, and is still trying to work out which parts of his life he chose and which parts simply happened to him.
Muoghalu spent years in the Nigerian banking sector before moving to the United Kingdom for graduate school. You can feel that history in the poems even when he does not spell it out. The cold lands differently. Marriage arrives as a social pressure before it arrives as a desire. Fatherhood rearranges the furniture. And underneath all of it sits the fact of a father who died when the poet was three months old, a loss that has no memories attached to it, only the long afterlife of absence.
That absence produces the best writing in the book. In the opening sequence on Death, Muoghalu writes:
You became a story before a memory,
a photograph before a presence.
The poems about arriving in Britain have a similar exactness. In Cold, the speaker walks out of the airport in African fabric, still carrying the confidence of someone who thinks he has prepared. Then the wind hits. He turns around and runs back inside. The line that stays with you is almost blunt:
You can prepare your clothes
and still be unprepared for the cold.
It is funny in a small way, and it is not only about weather. The same double feeling runs through the Relocation poems. People back home treat the move as pure success. The person who moved knows it is also a kind of loss. Muoghalu puts it without decoration:
I can be thankful for where I am
and still grieve where I came from.
No resolution is offered. The two feelings are allowed to sit there together. That is rarer than it should be.
Formally, the book is unpretentious. Free verse, conversational line breaks, almost no interest in sound pattern or structural risk. When the poems work, they work because the experience is specific, not because the technique is doing heavy lifting. That is a legitimate choice. Plenty of good poetry has been written in this register. The downside is obvious: when the thought goes soft, there is nothing else to carry the page.
The voice itself stays steady: earnest, reflective, rarely ironic. Muoghalu does not undercut his own sincerity, and he does not perform cleverness for the reader’s approval. In the current climate, that can feel either refreshing or exposed. Readers who want linguistic fireworks or tonal complexity will be disappointed. Readers who want someone to name ordinary difficulty without flinching may find the book more companionable than many flashier collections.
In the end, ‘The Things We Feel’ is a record of a life being examined while it is still in motion. The best pages stay close to the particular: the father who became a photograph before he could become a presence, the first British winter that no amount of clothing could fully prepare for, the son who hands a man back to himself, the mother whose giving never quite gets announced. When the poems trust those details, they earn their keep. When they reach for the general lesson, they sound like the kind of poetry that comforts more easily than it unsettles.
Both tendencies are present, and both make sense in a debut. The more interesting one is the tendency that does not yet know how the sentence should end. If Muoghalu keeps trusting the specific wound and the specific weather, the work will get harder and better. As it stands, the book is honest more often than it is fully realised. That is not nothing. It is a start.
Babatunde Adeleke is a Nigerian writer, poet and communications professional. His work has appeared in Nigerian Tribune, Sahara Reporters, Naira Stories, Inside Kaduna, and LagosToday, among others. He is the author of ‘Origami’ and ‘Pleasure Field’.
