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THE ANCHORED ANGEL by Jose Garcia Villa published by Kaya, paper, ISBN 1-885030-28-2 Review by Booklist, Dec 1, 1999 v96 i7 p680 COPYRIGHT 1999 American Library Association

Villa (1908-1997) is a most welcome rediscovery. He emigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines in 1929, eventually settling in New York and returning to his homeland only occasionally, mostly to be lionized as a godfather of Philippine literature in English. He published a story collection in 1933 but thereafter, inspired by e. e. cummings, wrote only poetry. Half of this book is a selection of poems, three stories, and two tiny essays. The poems, some designated "Lyrics" and others "Divine Poems," playfully and virtuosically consider love and a religious but hardly pious sense of life. They recall cummings' work, especially when Villa experiments to shape the reading of a poem by putting a comma after every word within a sentence, which induces the kind of meditative pace that Robert Lax achieves by dripping his lines syllabically down the page. The rather parabolic stories are about young Filipino men who, respectively, marry, emigrate, and die for love. The book's other half consists of friends' entertaining essays about Villa's extraordinary personality as well as his writing.

 

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