Adam Donaldson Powell: the Making of a Poet

I shall never forget the evening of September 2008 when I met Powell and Russo first time in Oslo, the evening when I by Grace of God talked to these great poets. It was a miracle, almost incredible to meet Albert Russo, the bilingual author, who writes in both English and French, his two ‘mother tongues’. The occasion was my visit to Oslo in 18-20 September 2008 to attend WORDS - one path to peace and understanding. This international festival was arranged under the auspices of the cultural organization Du store verden!/DSV. The festival WORDS was a grand success due to extraordinary efforts of Eli Borchgrevink, Managing Director of Du store verden!/DSV, Adam D. Powell, Diane Oatley and others.

I am highly obliged to Albert Russo for writing an excelent Foreword to my book. He is the recipient of many awards, such as The American Society of Writers Fiction Award, The British Diversity Short Story Award, several New York Poetry Forum Awards, Amelia Prose and Poetry awards and the Prix Colette, among others. He has also been nominated for the W.B. Yeats and Robert Penn Warren poetry awards.  His work, which has been praised by James Baldwin, Pierre Emmanuel, Paul Willems and Edmund White, has appeared worldwide in a dozen languages. His African novels have been favorably compared to V.S. Naipaul’s work, which was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001.  He is a member of the jury for the Prix Européen and sat in 1996 on the panel of the prestigious Neustadt Prize for Literature, which often leads to the Nobel Prize. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet these two finest poets.

The chief characteristics of Powell’s works become clearly defined in his literary criticism. This brings us to a very significant question: What is the importance of Powell as a literary critic? Not being a theorist, Powell doesn’t create schools of theories to analyze the aesthetics of literature. Instead, like Dr. Johnson he "used his criticism for the practical purpose of helping others to better read and understand literature." His criticism of individual poets will guide us in understanding clearly and completely Powell’s own poetry. Powell never adopts "hanging-judge attitude" in his critical essays on poets.