The Murmur Asylum: Poems

by Ned Parfan

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Unknown Binding

Published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

i adore sir ned, and i do love how fun he is as a teacher & person, but for the first read of this, i'm having a little trouble connecting with it.

i read this after tilt me as i bend, his sophomore collection, and i think seeing this as as how debut books should be seen, young and slightly teetering towards the safety of cohesiveness, made me appreciate tilt me and i bent a little bit more. the language is clear but sometimes uncolorful, and i'm a little thrown off by the gesture of images young writers often saturize their poems, not knowing what to do with them yet.

there is still fresh and refining moments of clear, metro & cosmopolitan traces of the setting, the overlapping narrative of being in a city fraught with disaster & relentless flooding. how easy it was to occupy a poem's space, bounce into the next, and tuck myself into that piece and still feel the veins of the other poems. but i think my issue was how easy it is, not yet reckless & not as fun as tilt me and i bend. maybe i'll like this more when i revisit it with new lens and fresh taste, but i'm sitting at a distant 2. good book for a debut.

[Warlou Joyce Antonio · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found a copy of this while scouting for books during the recent Manila International Book Fair. The title and the cover were intriguing and, I must say, the two reviews found at the back were convincing. I just had to read it, despite the fact that it was my first time to encounter this book. Fortunately, it has proven to be one of my successful impulse buys.

This poetry collection speaks of struggles and trauma and the phantom scars they leave. It captures nightmares in bite-sized forms that are still hard to swallow because of their sharp edges.

Also, the author’s voice is fully present throughout the whole book, and it bares both a vulnerability and strength that is quite compelling.

What I’m trying to say is that this collection is haunting – like most powerful books are. I’m so glad I braved the massive crowd during the event and that my feet found their way inside the booth of UP Press.

Lastly, I found a lot of lines unforgettable but I’ll leave some of my favorites here:

My pastoral:
I am here because of the city.

I am here to propose a legend that says the city was once
a tribe of children
humming around in a circle,
with embers at the center and cold hunger
for a story.

--
I am aware because I am awake.
Merciless consciousness.
Never in so much as a fragment of sleep.
Half-awake: purgatory,
“partial damnation.”

--
It was said
he never meant to touch the boy.
If they ask me now what happened,
I’m afraid I might make things up
for I wasn’t there, I wasn’t there anymore.

I thought I heard things, I will say, all by myself.
The murmurs the echoes
ricocheting above my head.

If that’s the case, they will say,
we cannot retrace the unraveling.
We cannot reverse-engineer the crash.

--
So many questions I’d like to ask him.

How old are you.
How did you feel.
What was the time, the day, the year.
Which version of the story in my head is real.

Did he hesitate I must know
when he chased the glow out of you,
did the bed capsize into the floor.

--
I atone just the same, dwelling
in the same body, carrying the same
skin, the failure to escape
the outbreak of fingers
that scattered and haunted,

pried open my eyelids, to check
if I was there, the pressure and lift
of them poking my flanks,
touching warmth, skin, a body
still mercilessly my own.

--
For hours on a page
I have tried to perform
the preposterous task of saying
the unsayable,
ending up in subterfuge,
getting lost in the howl
for exactitude. Say hello
to the limit. The walls.

--
We have all come so far.
And I’ve lost different selves along the way.

[Zymon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry for healing. I must admit I had raised an eyebrow several times the moment I sensed the pastiche of images of the city and images of child abuse early into this debut collection. When I got to the end, I had officially grasped the one theme that unites the poems: trauma. The obvious trauma from sexual assault, and the obvious trauma from a deluge. We may also see glimmers of parallelism between the two subjects: there is flood on the streets as much as there as a flood of fear during rape. However we view them, there is no denying of the shock the persona felt upon experiencing such horrors. We are urged to feel for this persona, for it’s through lyricism can this persona lay down burdens, even if the lyricism can sometimes sound cheesy or irrational. But irrational is what commonly happens when we’re afraid, is it not?

[Aloysiusi Lionel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Little did I expect that in this 70-page book, containing only 10 poems, I would find a great amount of consolation, an adoration independent of "prosthetic peripherals". There was a storm surge flooding the city gates. But there was also survival instinctively risen out of seashore's breath. Finding myself smile from the first page to last is equated with whispering: "Fait accompli!"