PALH BOOK REVIEWS

RETURNING A BORROWED TONGUE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FILIPINO AND FILIPINO-AMERICAN POETRY edited by Nick Carbo published by Coffee House Press; ISBN: 1566890438 Review by World Literature Today, Fall 1996 v70 n4 p1035(1) COPYRIGHT 1996 University of Oklahoma

The art historian Norman Bryson says that "art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand." Nick Carbo's Returning a Borrowed Tongue would certainly fix it in the readers' hand.

The volume is astonishing, to say the least, and some of the poems are simply enthralling. They are arranged alphabetically by author, but I chose not to read the anthology in that order. The first poem I came upon was by a poet I had never heard of before, Simeon Dumdum Jr. In "Some Die of Light" he writes: "Some interiors keep their shade / Blending the floor tiles with a cool burnt-leaf / Darkness - except perhaps one little slab / That (thanks to a chink in the roof) / Glares alone in the dusk of the interior." The associations these lines evoke are difficult to resist. One must read the whole poem to appreciate the poet's metaphorical minimalism.

Of the four generations of Filipino poetic tradition (the pioneering, the modern, the postwar or new-critical generation, and the contemporary generation), I am glad the contemporary writers do not disappoint. From Mila D. Aguilar to Alfred Yuson, the new blood write such scrumptious poems that the first one I mentally devoured made me hungry for more. I have always maintained that for Filipino writers to gain international recognition they should write in Pilipino; but Carbo's anthology has made me eat my words (momentarily), and I do so with relish. This is one of those times I am happy to be wrong. Returning a Borrowed Tongue is a stylish package that would do Americans proud for having introduced English in the Philippines, now the largest English-speaking cotintry in Asia. All the poets from the early 1900s to the present show a remarkable mastery of the English idiom and its nuances; no reader would suspect that the poems were not written by native speakers of the language.

Carbo has drawn together several styles of verse and several schools of thought. What results is a book that gives us harsh realism, lyrical beauty, and technical purity in poems that eloquently speak of subjects ranging from food to love and lust, from jeepneys to life and death. Fatima Lim is a prime example of the diversity and complexity of the Filipino poet. The last four lines of her "Alphabet Soup" ("With your flaming sword mark me, with a bloody / X to form my lips into singing, always, a heartfelt / Yes, Spewing baubles, I become the favored one. In this / Zoo of sycophants. I'm the parrot who's almost human") are whimsical and paradoxical all at once. She is an empress of this borrowed tongue we call English, capable of producing such wonderfully esoteric lines as "Wreath-heavy, a child's body / Glistens in the sun, cruciform / Among many whose limbs swell with significance" ("Raising the Dead"). Then we read "The Beginning of Things," and we marvel at her bone-clean lines: "Barefoot, I dance through fire. / I tower over trees. And I bring / To you, still smoking and warm / The beggar hands of a Goddess."

The works of Abad, Angeles, Gonzales, Hufana, Viray, and Yuson are written so artlessly they often require repeated readings before the art becomes apparent. Ilio, Hagedorn, Aguilar, Gamalinda, Francia, Ungria - the list of remarkable poets in this anthology is too long to mention, but I still wish I could add Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin, and Jose Lansang Jr. Their absence, however, does not detract from the overall quality of the collection. Nick Carbo has made a significant contribution to literature with Returning a Borrowed Tongue. A poet in his own right, he has given readers a collection of poems that will stay with them for a long time.

Al Camus Palomar University of Oklahoma

Review Grade: A

 

 

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