Lucidity, luminosity
The very first poem in Angela Narciso Torres’ second full collection of poetry, What Happens is Neither, published by Four Way Books in 2021, evokes a Filipino’s familiarity with homegrown caveats. Couplets with long lines craft a unity of tone, diction, and cadence that collaborate for curt eloquence.
If You Go to Bed Hungry: “If you go to bed hungry, your soul will get up and steal cold rice from the pot./ Stop playing with fire before the moon rises or you’ll pee in your sleep.// Sweeping the floor after dark sweeps wealth and good fortune out the door./ Fork dropped: a gentleman will visit. Spoon: a bashful lady.// Bathing after you’ve cooked over a hot stove makes the veins swell./ For safe passage to the guest who leaves mid-meal: turn your plate.// The adage goes: Coffee stunts growth. Twelve grapes on New Year’s: the opposite./ Advice from the learned: book under your pillow. Never step on. Never drop.// Every rice grain that remains on your plate you’ll meet again on the footpath/ to heaven. You’ll have to stoop to pick up each one.”
Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, mostly in Greenhills, she wrote a personal essay about this hometown as her contribution to an anthology on places in San Juan. This was right before she migrated with her husband and their young boys well over a decade ago.
The Ateneo graduate turned to poetry, and the warm encounter has blazed on since, initially kindled at the prestigious Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, before she took up Counseling Psychology at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and the Ragdale Foundation, plus a First Prize in the Yeats Poetry Prize (W.B. Yeats Society of New York) were early laurels.
The cento poem is often tagged as patchwork poetry. Also known as a ‘collage poem,’ it pays tribute to poets or writers one admires, and dutifully credits.
Her debut collection, Blood Orange (Aquarius Press, 2013), won the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry. I recall her revisiting Manila with copies that she launched and read from at the former Writers’ Bar at Fairmont Makati. A chapbook, To the Bone. was published by Sundress Publications in 2020.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest. Having relocated from city to city, she presently resides in Oceanside, California, while continuing to serve as a reviews editor for RHINO Poetry.
I’ve admired the lucidity of Angela’s poetry. Simple themes and concerns are simultaneously personalized and universalized beyond basic recognition of truths and essence. Refreshingly absent is what has become a trendy gambit in contemporary poetry that breaks away from narrative threads, in sudden leaps that only pronounce chasms in lieu of luminosity of chronological resolve.
Family remains her everyday subject, with seasons, foliage, blooms, and leaves, in particular, running second as intimate images, motifs, and refrains. In this collection of 55 poems, many dwell on her beloved parents, whom she lost successively within a fortnight four years ago, and to whom the book is dedicated.
She dotes lyrically on her mother, with memories of household, trust, and abiding love as significant streams of comfort, as in the poem “Recuerdo a mi Madre”: “Bewildered, I grew up,/ learned to embroider// an alphabet. I dipped my pen/ in father’s tears. To know// my mother requires/ the patience of a miner// carving amethyst from rock./ To know my mother// is to memorize/ a labyrinth of longing.”
(Recuerdo a mi Madre)
— Filipino American International Book Festival (@FilBookFestival) September 13, 2022
To know my mother
is to memorize a labyrinth of longing.
– Angela Narcisco Torres (@angela_n_torres)#FilBookFest #FilBookFest6 #FiltheShelves #Poetry pic.twitter.com/fAUwOnb9Z4
I also like another view of mothering, in Ode to the Areola: “Dark pigmented nebula/ deepening around the nipple/ after childbirth, purple/ haze surrounding/ the storm’s eye// not to be confused with/ aureole—that crown of light/ radiating from saints’ heads/ in certain Medieval paintings/ from the Latin aureolas/ derived from aurum/ meaning, “gold”// which is also the root for oriole—/ those amber-plumed passerines/ flashing against July’s late foliage/ aging from Kool-Aid lime/ to hunter green. Until recently// I thought areola descended/ from the same root for orioles/ and saints’ crowns. But in fact/ it derives from the Latin word// for “open place”—which might/ connote a sun-filled plaza/ somewhere in Tuscany// and not a chocolate cloud/ capping the snowy flesh/ my newborn rooted for at dawn/ his mouth a wrinkled rose.”
Angela also tries her hand at what may be called “exercise poetry” that experiments with new forms, as in her examples of “Golden Shovel” poems—“a form invented by American poet Terrance Hayes”—where a line by another poet is appropriated, with each word then positioned as the end word in each line of the “colonizing” poem. Notable poets she borrows from include William Butler Yeats and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Another form she applies, or plays with, is the cento (or semi-cento)—employing various lines from different poems. In Latin, cento means “patchwork garment.” So the cento poem is often tagged as patchwork poetry. Also known as a ‘collage poem’, it pays tribute to poets or writers one admires, and dutifully credits. In her case, Angela curtseys to Virginia Woolf and Witold Rybczynski. Lines Borrowed from a Marriage and Other Places italicizes lines from Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, and Joan Didion.
The title poem is precious, especially its last three stanzas: “Father calls to say she doesn’t/ recognize him. Turning to him,/ she cried out, certain a stranger/ was in her bed. He played/ his violin till she slept—a leaf/ in late fall curling into itself.// In autumn, chlorophyll disappears,/ cancelling green from leaves/ so yellow and magenta can blaze./ In my mirror I see her—the smile/ that favors a cheek, eyes slanting/ in the shape of small fish/ we eat for breakfast.// Trees know best the now of things./ What goes on has been going on/ for centuries. Washing dishes, I rest/ a foot in my standing leg. A fork clangs/ on the tile. I rinse a cracked cup./ I try not to think of endings.”