sequence, exemplified in such lyrics as "To a Fallen Soldier" and "Of Faith"; and the individualized stage, in which he attains the maturity and originality of form of such poems as "Night Rain", "Out of the Tower", and "Song". Throughout his work, certain themes recur: Violence and protest, as in Casualties; Institutional corruption, as in State of the Union; The beauty of nature and the landscape, as in A Reed in the Tide; European colonialism as in, for example, "Ivbie" in the Poems collection; The inhumanity of the human race as in Mandela and Other Poems. Clark frequently dealt with these themes through a complex interweaving of indigenous African imagery and that of the Western literary tradition. Drama Clark's dramatic work includes Song of a Goat – premiered at the Mbari Club in 1961 – a tragedy cast in the Greek classical mode in which the impotence of Zifa, the protagonist, causes his wife Ebiere and his brother Tonye to indulge in an illicit love relationship that results in suicide. This play was followed by a sequel, The Masquerade (1964), in which Dibiri's rage culminates in the death of his suitor Tufa. Other works include: The Raft (1964), in which four men drift helplessly down the Niger aboard a log raft. Ozidi (1966), a transcription of a performance of an epic drama of the Ijaw people. The Boat (1981), a prose drama that documents Ngbilebiri history. The Wives' Revolt (1991), the story of a Niger Delta community that received a payout from an oil firm drilling in its land; how the money is to be shared – between elders, men and women – eventually stokes the flame of revolution in the town. Although his plays have been criticized for leaning too much on the Greek classical mode (especially the early ones), for their thinness of structure and for unrealistic stage devices (such as the disintegration of the raft on the stage in The Raft), his defenders argue that they challenge and engage the audience with their poetic quality and their uniting of the foreign and the local through graphic imagery. Other works Clark's contribution to other genres includes his translation of the Ozidi Saga (1977), an oral literary epic of the Ijaw that in its local setting would normally take seven days to perform, his critical study The Example of Shakespeare (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), in which he articulates