CYMBELINE VILLAMIN Engages
The Door Opens… by Ysabel San Pedro Schuld
(Atticus, 2024)
It helps that this poetry collection, The Door Opens… by Ysabel San Pedro Schuld has a prologue. I would be intimidated to navigate it without a map. Of course I have known Ysabel for decades, since the time we were classmates in Ateneo de Manila University graduate school and a few years later as colleagues at the Department of Science and Technology. Still, I do not pretend to know how her creative psyche works. She surprises me, amazes me, catches me off-guard with her visions and epiphanies.
Reading this debut anthology of hers (under the pen name Calla Ysabel) is a delight, a full-circle journey of appreciating her as poetess, friend, private person, woman, a beautiful human being. I yield myself to the music of her free verses, do not struggle to pin down significances and meanings. But when tangibles and treasures do present themselves without my excavation of such, I am most happy.
“Ten Thousand Kisses” is nonchalant with a hidden hurt. There is a materialist, pragmatic side to eros that quantify rather than signify. And this kind of heaven is as what you expect—ephemeral, evanescent.
“Brainwashed Bliss” insinuates pleasure is not germane to the act of love but possible only with the conditioning of consciousness. Orgasm is a farce.
“Marriage” looks into the image of the wedding ring as suffocating, “could not imagine myself into this thing.”
I am sure
it is sick of sin
I am sure
it is a pure pain
I am sure
it is full of suffering
“How Many Lifetimes”—how very existentialist. How very much like Sisyphus condemned to keep on rolling up the rock that unceasingly falls. This is the poem of everyman.
It is never ending
It is too long and drawn
lessons, new and old
are mixed together in one mold
“The Being of It All” says—So you just dance your orbit / To find yourself. This is the last line of the last poem in the collection. The banner poem “The Door Opens” is liberating, empowering but also threatening. The door opens to an immense unfamiliar cosmos of freedom. Do I get lost there? Let me buy time for a while, to just dance my orbit to find myself.
Ysabel is gifted with discernment at age 60 y.o. What a blessing. Cheers!
*****
Cymbeline Villamin is a fictionist whose work explores transgressive desire as a site of knowledge, reckoning, and redemption. Her narrative moves through erotic thresholds, between body and faith, memory and futurity, myth and technology rendered in a layered style that invites multiple readings. Love in her work is never ornamental: it is dangerous, insurgent, and revealing.
She is the author of The Witch of Pontevedra, Ang Maghuhurno, and Lovers in Kyoto, all published by 8Letters Bookstore & Publishing. Across these works, Villamin interrogates intimacy as a moral and metaphysical event, where eros becomes a force that disrupts patriarchal order, exposes historical violence, and gestures toward grace. Her stories are often erotic not for shock, but for truth, where the body speaks what culture represses, and pleasure becomes a form of knowing.
Villamin is a graduate of A.B. Literature from Far Eastern University and was a fellow of the University of the Philippines - National Writing Workshop in 1976. She studied Creative Writing at Ateneo de Manila University, where her essay, “Writing as an Adventure,” was published in Philippine Studies (2005). She has contributed fiction and essays to various literary and cultural publications in the Philippines. Her work insists that eros and intellect are not opposites but collaborators, and that the erotic imagination, when written with rigor and lyric depth, can be a redemptive power.
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