PALH Book Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
In her first collection of poetry to be published in the United States, Tabios,
a recipient of the Philippines' National Book Award and the editor of such
anthologies such as Black Lightning: Poetry in Progress and Babaylan: An
Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Writers, explores how the colonizing
language both obviously and not-so-obviously alters expression, experience and
perception. Tabios begins the book with a selection of ekphrastic poems inspired
by ancient Greek sculptures, introducing the complex issues of cultural and
linguistic domination that are to play such a large part in the long central
section, titled "Returning the Borrowed Tongue." Her prose-poems balance (at
times uncomfortably) on the much-contested border between "prose" and "poetry,"
just as the pieces themselves explore the murky boundaries between colonization
and identity. Tabios investigates sensual and personal histories, conjuring
subtle games of domination and submission against a backdrop of physical
dislocation and echoing the conundrums of a colonized land: "The past depends on
how we control memory. Memory is a controlling agent. No one can discover what
lies beyond an image without the progress of light. Fearlessly, hands reach
forth to turn the vase around for another view. The blue vein leaps against the
pale hide of a wrist encircled by a thin strand of gold. And your finger is
tracing a vein, its protrusion helpless." The book closes with an ornate
triptych dedicated to Anne Truitt that exposes Tabios's search through history
and art to understand her central demands-to perceive freely, to investigate
color, to be a fully responsive being. "Can you pay the price for risking
perception and imperceptibility?" she asks in "The Continuance of the Gaze," and
then answers, "I trust in radiance. Let: Us." (Dec.) Copyright 2002 Cahners
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