Resistance and Revolutionary Aesthetics in Nnimmo Bassey's Niger Delta Poetry

The criticism of Niger Delta eco-conscious poetry continues to generate new insights about the plight of the region, but with greater attention to the threnodic sensibility of the poets and the degradation of the environment. This article engages with two eco-conscious collections of Nnimmo Bassey, one of the prominent voices in the campaign against environmental degradation in Nigeria, especially the Niger Delta region of the country. With insights from Marxist theory, selected eco-poems from We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood (2002) and I Will Not Dance to Your Beat (2011)are closely read to demonstrate how the poet’s violent tone and resistance thematic inclination imbue the poems with revolutionary temper