ALLEN BRAMHALL Reviews
Archipelago Dust by Karen Llagas
(Meritage Press, San Francisco & St. Helena, 2010)
This is
the first book by Filipino-American Karen Llagas. Do I need to mention her
cultural heritage? Perhaps this book endeavors to answer that question.
Remember, tho, that this is a book of poetry. Poetry speaks in curls and
shadows.
The first
verse of the first poem in this book, “Descent” seems telling:
My mother's name means end
in Tagalog and my father's name
means wound in Spanish.
...And Ms. Llagas is writing in
English. She does in fact teach and interpret Tagalog in San Francisco. You see
the forces at work in the quoted lines. Colonialism, imperialism, and the
impressive disregard have left their mark on the Philippines. The thing is,
these poems are not about that, but it seems like the odour is
inescapable.
Asked to explain my melancholy
I offer my full name and continue
to reside in English.
I don't want to misrepresent the work
here. The poems are personal and local. Stresses and reverberations sound the
human depth but the political mayhem cannot be ignored. A nascent stream wants
to find the sea.
“The moment / you close the door you
will start inventing / your father's country and this task will remain /
unfinished in your lifetime.”
I believe that when you start stating
what poetry is about you lose the trace. It is the traces, sifted thru
language, that beguile us. Nothing in these poems by Karen Llagas explain
anything. They have simply found the metre of melancholy, exaltation, and
confusion that we all hear.
Just to be disagreeably critical, I
think Ms. Llagas could scuttle a few commas and dependent clauses. Poetry is
punch.
Here's a striking,
surrealist poem:
The Museum of Smell
We could no longer
believe what we saw
so we built a museum
of smell. We placed
a jar of smoke from a
spiced lamb on a spit
beside a pewter jar of
a girl's burning hair.
We declared they could
only be acquired together.
We were asked to solve
problems of holding air,
of coddling scent
atoms so they don't, over time,
change. Chlorine, for
example. If as a child you
almost drowned, were
pulled down by a grip
so blue and sure of
where it wanted to take you
that you agreed to go,
if twenty-five years
later, you were in
love, spent a month by the pool,
in a far and easy
country. That licked-salt smell,
you'd think death.
Then, being effortlessly content.
Non-editor's note: I would place a
comma after 'change' then add 'like chlorine'. Then delete the following
verbless. The surreal and surprising stands out. Too many commas become too
many commas.
That being said, these are poems of
grace, founded in our small world.
*****
Re. Allen Bramhall: A
diminishing flow of poems, a continuing insistence in watching superhero movies
with my son, an increasing interest in the healing, lifebound elation of
creativity, and some websites:
Generally cheerful.
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