Book of the Week – Between Two Dates by Kwaku Feni Adow

Between Two Dates by Kwaku Feni Adow is a book shaped around mortality, but not solely around grief. The Ghanaian poet, writing in English alongside Twi and French translations, approaches death as a lived reality, a social ritual, a family history, and a philosophical reckoning. What emerges is not darkness for its own sake, but an extended meditation on how people accompany one another through loss.

Marta Chocilowska, in the foreword, notes that these poems carry “warm sorrow” and a measured tenderness. That tenderness runs through the collection.

The title poem gives the collection its centre:

tombstone—
between two dates
the length of life (p.17)

It is difficult to imagine a more economical framing of existence. A tombstone records birth and death, but Adow turns our attention to the narrow interval between them. Life becomes a brief passage rather than a monument.

Elsewhere, grief appears through physical inheritance:

after the funeral—
slipping into
father’s shoes (p.4)

The phrase carries several meanings at once. There is mourning, certainly, but also succession and responsibility. The poem recognises that loss alters identity. One does not merely grieve the dead; one begins to occupy spaces they once held.

Adow repeatedly places sorrow alongside unexpected insight:

graveyard
a family leaves short
of a member (p.6)

The language is spare. “Short” is not sentimental language. Yet that restraint sharpens the ache. Families return home recognisably themselves and irreversibly changed.

The poems are attentive to modernity too:

crying emoji
texting her my tears
and condolence (p.28)

This is not a dismissal of digital mourning. Instead, Adow records how grief adapts to contemporary forms. Distance, phones, symbols, and emotion coexist. The poem shows what consolation looks like now.

Perhaps one of the most touching poems appears near the close:

closing the door
on his child—
coffin lid (p.36)

The poem lands with startling force. The image of the coffin lid transforms into a parental gesture. Death moves from being an abstraction to unbearable intimacy.

Yet the collection is not unrelieved sorrow. Adow allows irony and layered perception to enter:

funeral—
his sleep empty
of snore (p.2)

The poem acknowledges absence through domestic detail. A snore, often dismissed as an annoyance, becomes what is suddenly missed.

Reading Between Two Dates, one begins to notice how often death is presented not as a singular event but as a communal experience. Processions, memorials, wreaths, graveyards, and candles create a shared geography of remembrance.

As you read, pause for a moment and ask yourself which poem unsettles you most. Is it the philosophical distance of the tombstone, or the intimate closeness of the coffin lid? And where, between those two experiences, does mourning settle for you?

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You can read the entire collection in the THF Digital Library.

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Do you have a full or chapbook length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Haiku featured in the Book of the Week Archive are selected by the THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are used with permission.