Al-Hikmah University Journal

Poetry, like all other genres where language is used to relate human experience, is not left out on the subject matter of the Covid-19 pandemic. Nigerian poets have contributed immensely to the discourse in this domain. This study aimed to examine selected poems in TanureOjaide'sNarrow Escapes, which is on the Covid-19 pandemic, It adopted a stylistic perspective with a view to investigate how language is manipulated to convey the poetic contributions to the trendy subject. Three poems were purposively selected and analysed with the toolkits of critical stylistics. The analysis of the selected poems has revealed that not only the poet's intent on the pandemic but also the poet's experience is related through specific linguistic choices such as pun, personification, allusion and analogy which run through the lines of the selected poems. The study concludes that the deployment of the critical stylistic tools for the analysis of the selected poems has unravelled the underlying sense which the poet conveys in a melodious manner.