Abstract This paper examines rank-shifting as a linguistic device in the poetry of Tanure Ojaide with the aim of showing how it helps the poet in the projection of the plight of the Niger Delta people and the socio-political problems in his country, Nigeria. The study is guided by M. A. K. Halliday’s “Scale and Category Grammar” as a theoretical framework and it adopts Adejare and Adejare’s (1996 and 2006) clause and group structural descriptive pattern in the analysis. Six poems are purposively selected from three different collections of Ojaide’s poetry based on the manifestation of rank-shifted structures and a detailed qualitative close analysis is carried out. The result shows that the use of rank-shifted groups and clauses as adjuncts provide circumstantial information. As qualifiers and elements of clause structure, they also aid the poet as a meaning making device and enable him to relate the messages of the poems to their socio-situational contexts. Shift in rank aids the poet in the realisation of the desired meanings on the heads of nominal groups as it provides information, which can be regarded as news on the head of a nominal group.