Nigeria, Jan. 29 -- 1966, P. Clark in one of his poems "Seasons of Omens" poetizes Nigeria's first military coup which occurred on 15th January 1966. Deploying metaphors to adumbrate the tense political situation that led to that tragic episode in Nigerian history, Clark uses the tropes of parallelism and refrain to underscore the poem's thematic preoccupation in the line, "Then came the five hunters" as well as the clincher "Then the five hunters struck". Observers of Nigerian history do not need the literary critic's exposition to understand that the "five hunters" refer to the five majors, the military officers, who led the January putsch that ruptured the nation's first republic.

Although, Clark's historicization is manifestly Niger...