ALOYSIUSI LIONEL POLINTAN
Reviews
Histories by Charlie Samuya Veric
(Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2015)
APHORISTIC LETTERS OF HOMEWARD MELANCHOLIA
The coconut trees
on the boulevard,
those long green figures
must be the envy of
trees in autumn,
shedding leaves,
brown and rigid,
newly dead,
beautiful.
-
from
"A Singular Catastrophe"
Charlie Samuya Veric’s overtly personal poems place the
reader in a realm of literary puzzlement. Verses with the subject of a
resounding "I" struggle and pain in places the reader might not know,
thus rendering a gap between authorial intent and desirable reading.
Notwithstanding this gap created by overflowing emotions longing for
substantiation, Histories (AdMU
Press, 2015) offers evidence that the poet aware of possible writer-reader
relational ambiguities creates poems capable of transcending context and
circumstance. The poems found in this collection are not confined as jewels on
a crown ever-radiant in a literary coliseum (and this is not his intent, for
sure). More than anything else, Veric's verses vivifies (alliteration intended)
his nostalgic and appetent tendencies with sincerity and simplicity, thus
making his "paper children" aphoristic letters of homeward
melancholia.
"Boys and girls in immaculate clothes, carrying
wreaths that left a trail of fragrant decay”—this is how Veric introduces his
impetus of writing poetry in regards to how he misses his hometown. Until now,
as what one would read in the last line of "Lines Composed While Biking to
the House of My Grandparents, Long Gone", he recognizes the truth he's
"still that boy / looking for love." The 35 poems are by turns the
reverberations of his amazement at New Haven's symmetry and surrealism and the
repercussions of how homesickness lurks on the wallpaper staring at him while
scribbling down a handful of verses dealing with loneliness. The balance
between these two hemispheres is not something to care about, for what's
important in the middle and end of this reading journey is that one is roused,
and eventually moved, to focus on chasing his dreams while acquiring bits of
temporal delight.
One clarification at this juncture is the fact that Histories does not totally shelter itself
under Veric's personal narratives, as seen in gleams of poems dwelling on the
persona's preference to be dispassionate observer endowed with "a distant
voice, speaking in a familiar tongue." The authorial self decided to
transcend axes and peripheries so he could look at and ponder on the environs
of a homesickness-inducing territory. One fine example is the voice in
"After Paradise"—a work of alternating histories birthing the
possibilities had Adam and Eve adhered to the Creator's command during their
stay in the Garden of Eden. The voice ends his soliloquy with: "He must
have longed for those days / when the sun shone without end / and the rain fell
only when he wanted it." Another example is "Ode to Experience"
where "[a] son comforting a mother beside herself, / speaking in a rabid
fire of what ifs" reminds a quotidian reader of his childhood experiences
with an extended family claiming authority over children approaching puberty,
the period of first infatuations, and heartbreaks. This book, needless to say,
is more than personal reminiscences and frame stories. This volume of verses
endeavors on relevance and humanity being shared in the void of words and in
the abundance of silences.
Fragments of a lived life Veric did not insist as one
lived immaculately, these poems were brilliantly and beautifully written under
one theory. And that theory is personal autonomy, postulating that the poet
need not be "written under" in the fertility of acts of
contextualization, historicization, and deterritorialization. He has the grasp,
a total grip, on how his life will be written. However, how it will be
understood by readers vicariously "looking for a missing heart" slips
from his hand.
*****
Aloysiusi Lionel Polintan is
a Senior High School Coordinator of Divina Pastora College in Gapan City, Nueva
Ecija. He loves reading and writing poetry, and everything that ranges from Bob
Dylan to Hozier, and from Mahalia Jackson to Christina Aguilera. He is doing
research on intangible cultural heritage of Southern Novo Ecijanos. He
maintains a blog: /react-text http://renaissanceofanotebook.blogspot.com
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