zarvindale's reviews
49 reviews

I believe Conchitina Cruz’s lyricism thrives in prose poems more than in the typical poems with enjambment. Although I enjoyed the images of still life, infidelity, and desire in this follow-up to Dark Hours, the prose poems in her debut summons a certain kind of magic that this second collection lacks. I, nevertheless, am amused with the manner in which the city influences once again Cruz’s writing, as if the city isn’t mere inspiration but a firm informant of her poetry and confessions.

“Send me to the moon,” a four-page poem in which the persona begs for the love of a man, is my absolute favorite.

Lately it takes me an hour to finish a poetry collection of 100 pages and less. With this one, I took my sweet time to reread and digest each poem and each section. Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta’s residency in Iowa in 2015 must’ve refined the way she writes. Her poems here are much clearer than those that appear on her previous collections. The lines are more connected, and the poems in general look amusing, as always, on the pages. She has managed to stick to one theme this time too. Her love poems are informed by strong emotions as well as bourgeois art. She takes on visual cues, with the paintings and colors, as much as she mentions auditory effects, such as an arpeggio and a hush. Lonely poems gather and find port in this book, which also acts as a harbor for lucidity.

I read this through UST Publishing House’s compilation with Hush Harbor. My idea of this second poetry collection prior to reading it was Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta lamented on the death of a (her?) father, and the title represents the destruction of the house upon the absence of the head. After sitting through the collection, I was surprised to have read fewer elegies about the father than poems about love and sex. Maybe that’s why “house” is written in plural in the title. On one hand, we have a house burning because of raging grief; on the other we have a house burning because of inextinguishable desire. Regardless of what the title exactly alludes to, the constant theme of this collection is absence: the absence of a father figure as well as the absence of a partner. What do we do with these empty spaces? Perhaps write a poem, perhaps write at least one whose lines are connected and never-been-done-before for once.

There isn’t an entry of Eros Redux on this platform, so this is the book I’ll be logging instead. Named as one of the best poetry collections of Philippine literature, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta revists her debut to provide minimal revisions to and offer new meanings of her old poems. I must say that the first section will serve better as a chapbook along with Ache Bone. The second and third sections are strikingly distinct in style compared to the first, which is comprised of incomplete sentences as lines that are not obviously connected. That’s the reason I couldn’t give this book a perfect rating: the writing style is so unique it made the poems a little distracting to digest. I’m fascinated with Katigbak-Lacuesta’s dramatizations, nevertheless. If one were to see the marks I made to note the most noteworthy lines in this collection, they would be overwhelmed. If Eros here is a proxy, what shall I expect from the real one?

This poetry collection by Merlinda Bobis is perhaps the fastest poetry collection I’ve ever read. I found little to no problems understanding the poems in English; I wish it was the same with Filipino, although I’m a Filipino speaker. I’m grateful I revisited this book, which I regard as an epitome of immaculateness, because it reacquainted me with the Filipino language after being immersed in English for quite a while now in a mission to master it.

I strongly believe every multilingual poet should release a project like this, in which they translate their own poems from their mother tongue into English and other languages they’re fluent in. I sense a need of translation because, another language offers new style and meaning to the original. In this collection, for example, we can sense the struggle of putting into words an idea or image that hardly exist in English. To work around this problem, Bobis resorts to generalization and omits a few things while managing to retain the thought and emotion of a piece. There’s a feeling of resistance throughout this book, and so in our reading experience we choose which among the three versions of a poem provides the best representation.

Translation, I believe, most often works well when the multilingual creator, the author, themselves carry it out. The author is the source of the images that spring from the page to the minds of the readers, so there’s no justice firmer than that meted out by the author.

Of course I am aware that translation is not an easy job, even if an author is fluent in all the languages they know. What I’m saying is that poems translated by their author are more authentic and deeply appreciated, as they are more accurate and further enrich the reading experience.

This collection is saturated with grief and wistfulness. So much of what’s happening here is death: of a family member, of a friend, of a relationship. At some point I have begun thinking that perhaps the death of a beloved is the death of love. After the death of others we must simply go on, live our lives as we continue to keep them in memory and make occasional quips in order to lighten our burdens. Isabela Banzon puts sadness into words pretty well in this book.

Rereading this book made me realize that Isabela Banzon has never held a booksigning in the Philippines. This influential poetry collection of hers is something I cherish and will never let go. She is mostly known for her love poems, some of which use different languages to capture what she wants to say, but her poems about Filipinos in the growing world are just as accurate in depiction. There is fondness for a lover here as well as fondness for the Philippines. Banzon can speak and long about a lover as well as speak and long for her nation. There is agility in the way the images and personifications here move from personal affairs to political concerns, and that’s perhaps because she believes that Filipinos hold romance with the same regard as nationalism. If a person claims to love a Filipino, they are loving that Filipino’s identity.

I am not exaggerating when I say this is the best poetry collection ever published. This is imaginative yet depraved, humorous yet troublesome, welcoming yet disrespectful. This is meant neither for the faint-hearted nor the morally upright. Andrea V. Tubig doesn’t give a single fuck about the sensibilities and celebrities she might offend with her poems. She knows damn well what she’s written, and she tells you that from time to time throughout this book in a self-reflexive manner only wicked individuals like poets can demonstrate. I’m starting to think she is the Angelo V. Suarez of female Filipino poets: her debut poetry collection was published before she earned her bachelor’s degree, plus the level of sex drive she displays here is the same level of sex drive Suarez displays in his second book. (Not to mention that their middle names start with the same letter, plus the title of her book has the same number of words as the title of Suarez’s second book.) Talk about a start! Tubig’s brain can be a subject of study by scientists and writers alike for the way it comes up with images that only sinners can come up with but even the most prude reader can understand.

Second time reading this marvel of a book. Beneath the poems that make up this calm, breathtaking collection is seething boredom and frustration. The persona here sits, ruminates; this image forms an entire still life that we can peer into as it gets juxtaposed with images and personified elements of nature. As Mabi David writes in her most popular poem to date: “Nothing is happening.” The persona is catastrophically stuck, so as to pass time she drops these revelations that are so searing they leave a hot mark. Here enters the collection’s title. How else can we describe the persona if not with a one-syllable six-letter word that’s synonymous to bad mood?

“Part of the act is the idea of presence,” Mabi David begins in one of the series of poems that bears the book’s title. Through the same line, David summarizes this entire collection of declaring existence. She asserts that she is here, wherever that may be, as well as her addresees, wherever they may be. She documents as well as ruminates on many rich histories, be it tourist sites or commonplaces that turn into something remarkably impactful in relation to something or someone close to her heart. Perhaps the “you” that’s being referred to is grief, which, it appears to me, is the overall emotion summoned by this collection. I share David’s grief here, even though it’s quite remote from experience, but I likewise feel grief for the lyric poems I would’ve admired if only the writing style didn’t distract me.