Admirable fresh poetry

Looking back at it now, somehow I’m assured that while I may not have kept up with recent online exchanges among our younger poets, erstwhile unfamiliarity with Taguilaso’s work didn’t deter an objective eye from welcoming fresh poetry with a high degree of appreciation. It wasn’t until much later that communication with younger poet-friends confirmed the levels of admiration and support for her poems.

How can it not be so, when her assured articulation is exemplified by such lines as the following, from her long poem “Svrgery” which appeared in a subsequent issue of Santelmo:

“How I can cut open bodies/ and sew them up as easily as I speak// a foreign tongue. Another two years waiting/ for the entire process, perhaps. Add another// year because I am Asian, female, and my family refuses/ to mingle with politicians. My grandfather is admitted in the hospital// again—what kind of granddaughter does that make me/ if I leave? They say the word immigrant so easily, rolling off// the grooves of their changed tongues. Accents lost at sea like baggage discarded so the ship remains afloat.”

The back-cover blurb by fellow poet Christine V. Lao reads: “Juggernaut is not for the faint-hearted. Its poems careen from surgical to surreal, attend to the comical and criminal, and dispense an unflinching diagnosis of all that ails the self, the familial, the familiar, and the nation during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Alyza joins the ever-expanding list of physicians presently contributing most notably to our literature, led by the likes of best-selling author and essayist Ron Baticulon, and well-versed poet-translator Alice Sun-Cua. There’s another roster that her first book entitles her to join, that of the new generation of poets in imminent welcome of the torch that premier poets such as Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Simeon Dumdum Jr., and Dinah Roma have yet to pass on. The contemporary cohort is now led by perennial prizewinners Joel Toledo, the bilingual Mikael de Lara Co, Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta, F. Jordan Carnice, Trish Shishikura, and Frank Cimatu (also bilingual).

The first poem in Juggernaut, “Swerte,” serves notice: “… Rooted in the motherland but not morena enough/ to warrant standard sympathies. Swerteng mestizo. Hardship is measured/ by the shade of your skin, by how many vowels in your surname remains/ of your ancestors….”

The long lines look amply indebted to prose, but as with the rest of the collection, which also sports prose poems, the cadence and choice of metaphors render musicality, intellect, and insight throughout a remarkably stimulating universe of subjects and themes.

Far from random, these include personal history, origins, parents, grandparents, rhetorical arguments on divinity, spirituality, existentialism, the environment, evolution, and laments on earth’s condition, plus possible extinction. Add litanies of things kept or collected, and imagined scenarios with selected fruits and animals. Her extensive reading habits lend mentions of Vivaldi, Mozart, and Methuselah. They also allow intimate passage through decades and centuries that include the future/s, with “the sky falling.”

These are often cross-hatched with the confines and conditions of her chosen profession, as with “Meditations on a Fractured Archipelago”: “… greed grows/ its exit wounds on almost all corners of this nation…” Particular titles also dance around her core exercises, among these “Three Movements on Anatomy,” “The Study of Medicine,” “Examination” “From the Early Days of the Plague, 21st Century” and “Doomsday Dictionary,” which starts: “I am the ambulance siren awakening you in the afternoons./ I am the bruises on both cheeks; remove the mask and you lose this battle.”

Questions on faith and belief alternate with simplicity of premises, as with “Pearls” (among my most favorite of the collection):

“Lola said You must learn to swallow/ your heartaches, I was ten, knew nothing/ of love, save for presents. Coloring// books, paintbrushes./ I had the precision, fingers drafting/ sprinkles and spires on eggshell paper.// There were far too many/ child prodigies. My paintings mere blister dreams/ in an ocean of Promil Kids. They decided// I would be a doctor: never to starve, well-/ fed by afflictions, tumors, and boils. Scalpel and suture/ in place of pencil. I take it, gulp it down// like a pill. Gorge on. Pray./ Someday I might cough up a pearl/ or choke.”

Let us all look forward to more of Alyza Taguilaso’s “future/s”—even if and when the sky keeps falling.