zarvindale's reviews
49 reviews

You are the Buddha, they are the Buddha, we are the Buddha! is perhaps what Luisa Igloria claims through this collection of mad and marvelous poems. Contrary to the typical blessed image, the Buddha here assumes qualities of humanness and ordinariness, inasmuch as a reader may pick up bits of themselves in some of these poems. This book is hard to let go, like a golden treasure that takes hours before it’s completely dug up from filthy ground.

Luisa Igloria is the perfect living proof of how craft gets better over time by honing it. Prior to diving into this immaculate collection, I got my hands on two of her earlier books. With every book she releases, she becomes more lyrical, even if a lot of her poems are narrative in nature. The odes here are just as lovely as the ghazals. The prose poems are just as interesting as the narrative verses. There is likewise a demonstration of knowledge here; we get to learn about the names of everyday things such as birds, colors, plants—all of which form rich landscapes from which bear fruits of deep thought.

Occasionally funny, thoroughly wistful. I am fascinated with Luisa Igloria’s obsession with ghazals. Turning traditional verses, which stretch the limits of logic, into contemporary poetry, which is less restricted and more experimental, is always welcomed by me with a tight hug. This poetry collection makes me yearn for vacations and visits in other countries.

In this poetry collection, Luisa Igloria dwells in the past—in history as well as in personal memory. There is drama that swells in paintings and in recollections, and Igloria takes advantage of this drama as much as possible. The result is a book saturated with images whose descriptions are lush and vivid. The title is pretty although a little misleading; I was led to expect a brief history of Filipinos amid the Spanish colonization.

I was not expecting the poor reception of this debut poetry collection here. It’s a hypersexual gay book for starters. Arvin Abejo Mangohig muses about past lovers and fuck buddies to the extent that he sounds a little too cheesy and corny. If you think about it, that’s what desire, whether evolved into obsession or matured into passion, affects a person. Plain hookups and love stories are turned into overly dramatic narrative poems, which are easy to read for an allosexual gay male reader to feel instantly represented. (This review comes from an acespec reader.)

I have to admit: I have never finished Jose Rizal’s books. This second poetry collection by Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr. reminds me to pull my copies of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo from my shelves and begin from the start. Rizal’s first novel informs the poems here, each of which corresponds to a title of a chapter of the novel. It’s amusing to see the limits of logic be stretched, through lipograms and various traditional verses and other showcases of wit, to spawn musings and reimaginings of another writer’s work. Such boldness to build upon another creation, a classic in this context, is what fosters a sense of connectedness within the literary community.

I got to read this poetry collection when the author sent me a free copy of it years ago, after he read my tweet in which I was desperately seeking it. Rodrigo Dela Peña Jr.’s work is one I admire because it is easy to read while remaining bound to the conventions of lyric poetry. In this collection, sound becomes an outlet of grief over tragedy, over death. This sound isn’t merely a warble; it’s an aria, loud and shrill for the world to hear. The notes ascend and swell so as to summon God, who’s believed to be capable of explaining why every unfortunate thing must happen. Sorrow is clear here, just as it is dramatic in nature.

“A street is a way of watching a movie when you don’t have money. A picture is a happy place of somewhere far enough to think it will be better when you’re there,” writes Lawrence Lacambra Ypil, who muses in this second poetry collection on the city as sites of memory, and photographs as evidence of memory. Through ekphrasis, he furnishes descriptions and stories about Filipinos who lived during the American occupation. The objective is to present selected pictures of ordinary lives as dramatically as possible, perhaps to enrich the experience and add meaning to the gestures, expressions, and perspectives provided. Several natures of a city are ultimately offered, and around these natures people in the tropics move, shape, and define their lives.

I’m glad I revisited this debut poetry collection years after I read it. Now that I have a firmer grasp of poetry and language, I have come to understand Lawrence Lacambra Ypil’s attempts at dramatizing the city and youth. This book is composed of observations of homes, landscapes, and the events that unfolded in between these sites of experiences. Although the writing style hinders a total understanding of the poems, they nevertheless get increasingly interesting, lyrical, and wistful. There’s an apparent objective of immortalizing memories on page, of looking back into the past, as if a window suddenly opens to reveal new, shifting frames of assorted views.

Merlinda Bobis takes advantage of her experiences and knowledge of history anf current events in this lengthy poetry collection. In the process of doing so, she extends her gratitude to friends and family by remembering their shared moments, all of which are memories now immortalized on the pages through the poems.