Exploring Thematic Discourse through Style Study in Select Poems of Joe Ushie: A Systemic Functional Approach

Abstract

This study explores select poems from Joe Ushie’s five collections of poems. These collections are: Popular Stand and Other Poems (1992), Lambs At The Shrine (1995), Eclipse in Rwanda (1998), Hill Songs (2000), and A Reign of Locusts (2004). From these collections, one poem each is selected and analysed in this study. The poems that are selected from these collections are poems with thematic discourses that border on Socio-political issues, events and experiences within the corpus of the Nigerian nation. The choice of poems with socio-political themes is predicated upon the fact that discourses on social and political issues have been and will always be topical within and outside the ambience of literary creativity. The study is anchored on the theoretical framework of the M.A.K. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar, though borrowing a lead from Ushie (2014)’s analytical perspective of selected third generation Nigerian poets. The study reveals that Ushie’s poetry is rich, insightful and engaging in socio-political themes and discourses, wrapped with the clothing of stylo-styntactic strategies of transitivity, mood and residue, and the theme and rheme system. The study recommends further stylistic research into Ushie’s poetry in areas such as phonology, lexical and morphology, lexico-semantics, graphology as well as textual devices, which are rich areas of stylistic investigation.

Key Words: Joe Ushie, systemic functional Grammar, socio-political and poetry.