There are MANY reasons to love this book. For example, one of many highlights for me is "Upland Dance", which in my first reading came across as a text-dance; I immediately wanted to suggest to Barbara that if she ever read the poem in public, she should be doing so, say, in front of the mike and dancing versus standing behind a podium or lectern. The poem moves far beyond the page and voice and embodies itself! Later, I would discover in the Notes to Poems that the poem was written "after" a 2007 performance by the Ifugao Music and Dance Ensemble performance in San Francisco, which is to say that it's quite an achievement for the poem to exactly match the underlying inspiration, in this case of dance.For more musings on poetry, publishing, art, and wine; please visit Eileen's blog—The Blind Chatelaine's Keys.
I also want to share my observation: this poetry collection has the best (as in most effective) *narrative arc* I can recall reading from the past hundreds of poetry books I've read recently. One of the most stellar achievements of this book is how it ends. The choice of the last poem, "Aswang," elevated the all of the book into strength and power(!) -- a point worth noting because much of the words are just so lushly beautiful. To be beautiful is often to be stared at -- with the last poem, the reader suddenly realizes the reader is also being witnessed. The reader is being watched .... as in, I am watching you to make sure the wrongs of history will know: Never Again.
Randall Mann is the author of the poetry collections Breakfast with Thom Gunn, a finalist for the California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award, and Complaint in the Garden, winner of the Kenyon Review Prize; and co-author of the textbook Writing Poems, Seventh Edition. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Poetry, Paris Review, New Republic, and Salmagundi. He works as an editor and lives in San Francisco. |
| DIWATA Barbara Jane Reyes BOA Editions, Ltd. 2010 |
Really, Diwata‘s toughest reader for me is going to be my mother. Critics, book reviewers, academics, po-biz H8ers got nothing on the fear I felt when I handed my mother her copy of Diwata.
First thing: She is a reader. She will read my book. Indeed, the people in my family are readers. My mother’s friends are also readers; some of them apparently follow my work, and so they will also read Diwata. That’s pretty awesome, especially given what we’re always told about Filipinos being non-readers and non-book buyers. For me, what is at stake is this: I need my mother to know that my work as a poet is an earnest attempt at paying respect to our elders and ancestors. More concretely, I have dedicated my book to my mother’s eldest sister and her father, both of whom are recently deceased, and this gesture really touched her. I want my mother not to be disappointed by what I have written in their memory.
Read more here.
