I Feel the Creation in Diwata as if I am part of it too

-->

I have learned that, sometimes, falling in love with a book begins with small, physical things. I liked the way the Diwata looked when it arrived in the mail. Its wide and long shape—the weight of it. The way the image on the cover flows off the page as if it cannot be contained. The cover artwork is full of symbols, scribbles and images: beauty, and inaccessibility—the body facing away or gazing in.

The cover shaped my reading, and I was half in love when I started reading it.  Now I will say, after reading the book, that love is not the right word. Instead I will say I carry parts of Diwata with me as if it created a creation story while I read it. And while I am not Filipino, I felt/feel part of that story: between disconnections I feel connection.

I feel the separation and connection from the text-like symbols on the cover and the undecipherableness between the text, the black lines moving down the page and the exposed body. There is something arresting in the separation of symbols above the body and those on the body and the lines that frame and divide the image.  What I noticed while reading was that a similar, but deeper division exists in the body of the text. It is apparent on the first page from the separation between the text taken from Penelope V. Flores’s “Malakas at Maganda” and the story from Genesis. The theme continues throughout the book as we are separated again and again by language, content, subject, line breaks and so on. The effect of reaching between or beyond lines creates displacement that is both beautiful and haunting.  As a reader I existed in search of connections between disconnections, between different stories of creation, and the embodiment of a new creation, which in the process of reading, is being created.

            There is a stunning exploration of form in Reyes’s poems. A question that seems to linger and ask where form comes from, and who created it. Every poem seems to explore form on some level. For example, long prose poems like “Let Eve Speak” unfold in long sentences that build into a kind of intimate narrative:

“Were I to assign us color, we would be mood ring, and then I would understand how heat and pressure make us glow bright crimson in our faux gold casing, how blood makes us murky aquamarine. Think of your pulse, beneath an undulating mirror of sky, think of salt crystallizing upon thighs and hands and lips, feathery seagrass tickling the soles of our feet. Even the coolest freshwater springs are momentary, dissipating. How moonless winters and sunrises can be held hostage, how nothing touches you. How this causes you to forget you are standing. How you are drowning. How you cannot feel your lungs. How the sky refuses to give its light to you. How you have forgotten how to breathe” (11-20).

Other prose poems use short staccato sentences or fragments that challenge narrative or create a new type of narrative. Specifically, I’m thinking of “Call it Talisman (If You Must)” where fragments and short lines of prose build up a fractured narrative, which continues in four numbered sections.  “In The City, A New Congregation Finds Her” is composed in couplets where each line is end stopped, while “A Chorus Of Villagers Sing A Song From Another Time Now Only A Memory” is another poem in couplets, but with fluid grammar where every other line is end stopped. Then there is “Medicine Song” a poem with no end stops or capitalization. Instead, it is composed in lyric lines that run together, and is controlled by other caesura and large spaces between each line break:

windstorm in his throat, burning

hummingbird in his throat, flying

river tide in his throat, howling (1-3)

There is so much variation in form. From the way lines break, shifting grammar, the Form. Somehow the poems feel strangely cohesive—not because of any singular form, but the lack of it—the search for it. I have considered why there are so many forms and I don’t have an answer. I will only say that each form and each poem seems like a test of creation.  As if each poem creates a form that seeks to hold the poem/story/emotions—the place between connection and disconnection.

I’m ahead on the reading because I couldn’t put the book down. So I’m going to read it again before class—it’s just that complex and good. As I write this I’m looking at the cover again, noticing that the female figure faces the lines/scribble/ text above her, but she cannot see the images on her back.  I wonder does she feel them? I don’t know. But I think she does, or after reading the book I feel as if she does. Maybe that’s a silly thought, but I will leave it in this post anyway.

See you Tuesday.