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In Transitives
- GenresPoetry
86 pages
First published January 1, 2005
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About the author
Isabelita Orlina Reyes
4 books1 followerIsabelita Orlina Reyes is a Filipino poet and literary editor known for her writings about urban life. Her work, which often depicts the experiences of the urban middle class in the Philippines, has been published by the University of the Philippines Press.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 6, 2024
“trace time from one banality to the next / an unspoken vector from me to you”
“faith, the absolute suddenness / of believing even when you decline / to confess it all, should be enough”
and many more, honestly would be too much, these being not even my most favorite lines, but to be the highlight of what i think surmise my feelings about the collection. Reyes’ collection is what I’ll categorize on the class of the city poems, already linked to as old as Baudelaire and to the modern Filipino poet tired of commute and “urban freedom” confined in the busy and harsh landscapes of the city and its in transitive canals. Reyes is one of the latter that hones in on this hard through this collection, poems that breathe unrest, whose familiar unrest is paralleled with the lyrical staccato poem endings without punctuations. Which for me is the pleasure of reading them, the familiarity of it, nothing new is brought out that we don’t know already about the city but the way it moves is an exercise of appreciation for the lyric elucidation. What is interesting even is how ofcourse my city poem riddled mind can’t help but compare it to my favorite Filipiniana one which is Cruz’ “Dark Hours” only to learn that both are published in the same year by UP Press, a momentous era for the City poet, but both covers their own version of the experience.
“then the absence of. Sometimes // there is no art in this city / so will yourself past” the persona of the poem suggests, maybe so, but the contradiction of it is the beauty of the art she imposes on the poem and then one sees it birthing from the tiresome city life, we can’t seem to escape, like the “centeredness, the one tenor of / the I with all its indulgence.”Fluctuating from the familial, imaginative, surreal and the real, the words Reyes plays in this collection is an unrest we can recite by heart but still appreciate where it came from.
“faith, the absolute suddenness / of believing even when you decline / to confess it all, should be enough”
and many more, honestly would be too much, these being not even my most favorite lines, but to be the highlight of what i think surmise my feelings about the collection. Reyes’ collection is what I’ll categorize on the class of the city poems, already linked to as old as Baudelaire and to the modern Filipino poet tired of commute and “urban freedom” confined in the busy and harsh landscapes of the city and its in transitive canals. Reyes is one of the latter that hones in on this hard through this collection, poems that breathe unrest, whose familiar unrest is paralleled with the lyrical staccato poem endings without punctuations. Which for me is the pleasure of reading them, the familiarity of it, nothing new is brought out that we don’t know already about the city but the way it moves is an exercise of appreciation for the lyric elucidation. What is interesting even is how ofcourse my city poem riddled mind can’t help but compare it to my favorite Filipiniana one which is Cruz’ “Dark Hours” only to learn that both are published in the same year by UP Press, a momentous era for the City poet, but both covers their own version of the experience.
“then the absence of. Sometimes // there is no art in this city / so will yourself past” the persona of the poem suggests, maybe so, but the contradiction of it is the beauty of the art she imposes on the poem and then one sees it birthing from the tiresome city life, we can’t seem to escape, like the “centeredness, the one tenor of / the I with all its indulgence.”Fluctuating from the familial, imaginative, surreal and the real, the words Reyes plays in this collection is an unrest we can recite by heart but still appreciate where it came from.
Displaying 1 of 1 review