Clinical Blues is a moveable feast of ideas, recollections, aspirations and apparitions of desire in the collective but submerged consciousness of the new Africa. Dami Ajayi, on the basis of this collection follows in a great tradition of medical doctors who were writers, and is also able to catch the inflections of Anglo-American modernisms – his poems resonate with Eliot’s arch wit and startling images and phrasing. At times lyrical, at times satirical, this is poetry of vision, humanity, and genuine literary value. Lines and observations lift free of essays on housewives, on God, on love, on the medical clinic. This is a book everyone interested in emerging African voices should own.