THE BUDDHA WONDERS IF SHE IS HAVING A MID-LIFE CRISIS by LUISA A. IGLORIA

NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews

THE BUDDHA WONDERS IF SHE IS HAVING A MID-LIFE CRISIS by Luisa A. Igloria (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal, 2018)

BOOK LINK 

‘The Buddha in me greets the Buddha in you.’ In this collection, it seems that the Buddha is everywhere. S/he appears in the titles of no less than 17 of the 53 poems which are divided into three sections and a coda. Ira Sukrungruang, in his Foreword, says ‘S/he possesses all that is human, every fragility we keep within. S/he is the voice we’ve locked inside. S/he is comprised of mythology, tradition, and imagination….Poem after poem reveals the Buddha.’

‘The Buddha Wonders If She Is Having A Mid-Life Crisis’ is the latest full-length work to appear by Luisa A. Igloria whose other most recent books include Night Willow (Phoenicia Publishing, 2014) and Ode to the Heart Smaller Than A Pencil Eraser (Utah State University Press, 2014). Igloria teaches on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, which she directed from 2009-2015. In 2015 she won the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry.

Many of the poems in this collection are timely and thought-provoking. They are written in an uncomplicated, conversational style and, even though they have much to say to us about important issues, avoid the pitfall of sliding into didacticism. Questions are asked which cause us to pause for thought: ‘What is a truth? What is a falsehood? What is merely unspoken or denied? (Five Mysteries); ‘how is it possible to cultivate detachment / at the same time that one practices compassion?’ (The Buddha listens) and ‘is the sparrow happier than we are? Is the crow?’ (from a poem bearing the same title as the line just quoted). 

Igloria’s poems are bursting with questions. One poem even has the word as its title: ‘Preguntas’. This poem then proceeds to ask ten questions to which we have no answer. Indeed, the questions posed in this book are philosophical and hypothetical. They do not require us to answer them, only to think about them. This is the serious side to the collection. The comical side is quite different and it is to that element that I want to turn next.

The title of the collection is comical in itself. The comical dimension has its hidden depth of course. Comedy is often used as a vehicle to explore specific issues and Igloria uses it as a means for us to confront our own issues, whatever they may be, head-on. ‘The Buddha considers with all seriousness’ is a gem of a poem that sets us all thinking about our susceptibility to temptation:

The Buddha considers with all seriousness

the variety of decisions that revolve around desire:

Nuella chocolate chip with sea salt, pistachio lemon

creme, or cinnamon amaretto swirl? Where is human nature

so weak as in the ice cream section of a 24-hour grocery store? 

In ‘The Buddha wanders into the wilderness’ the issue at stake is consumerism.  The wilderness is not, as you might imagine, the desert, but ‘the downtown mall’ where he is assailed by products in a cookery store bearing ‘three-digit / price tags’ and a rather persuasive sales assistant called Artemis who offers him ‘little paper cup samples of flavored coffee / brewed from individual pods dropped in a chrome - / fitted machine vaguely resembling a tabletop / silo’. 

We might think that the Buddha ‘has no need to work out issues, or even that / he has any issues’ but we are wrong. In ‘The Buddha goes on the Internet’ the Buddha goes ‘to look for a licensed counsellor and therapist’. This is in strong contrast to ‘every brass likeness and stone statue…that depicts him in nothing but an attitude of pure serenity.’ It’s not easy to think of the ideal as being less than ideal. The Buddha, it turns out, is human just like the rest of us. He fills in job applications and knows what it is like to feel like a wallflower at parties (but does not really mind). Today we see statues of the Buddha seated and serene but for centuries he was represented only as a set of symbols. The big question is how can the infinite, the boundless, be understood?  Igloria seems to hint that the key may lie in our understanding of ourselves, in the Buddha within us all.

In the title poem, the Buddha’s experiences are closely aligned to our own:

these days, tears come easily and often, in public, at

inappropriate times; or without preamble as she drives

the car to or from work. Sometimes she has to pull up

by the curb to wipe waterfalls from her eyes – she doesn’t

want to ruin her spotless driving record, much less cause

injury to another creature on the road. Ask your doctor

about hormone replacement therapy, says her girlfriend.

Concerns about global warming, poverty, internet addiction and how we have lost the ability to sit still for any length of time in the frenetic world in which we find ourselves are just some of the important issues that are addressed in this volume. 

One of the key messages to come out of this collection is contained in the fifth and sixth stanzas of ‘What would the Buddha say?’:

The thing I want to say

is that the Buddha was also human –

except perhaps with an extraordinary

capacity for understanding I do not yet

but would so dearly like to have.

The position of the line break is pivotal in our reading here. It helps to place real emphasis on the desire for understanding.

Another key statement appears in ‘How Much’:

The problem with trying to be in the world

while not being caught up in it is that one is

always in the world.

In Igloria’s poems The Buddha is a talisman ‘to ground us in the blue distance,’ as we seek our true meridian, something to stop us ‘turning into a particle of disbelief’. Recommended.

*****

Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014), Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017) and Punching Cork Stoppers (Original Plus, 2018). His work has been translated into several languages.

WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR by EILEEN R. TABIOS

NEIL LEADBEATER Reviews

WITNESS IN THE CONVEX MIRROR by Eileen R. Tabios

(TinFish Press, Hawai’i, 2019)

BOOK LINK

All the poems in this collection take as their starting-point lines from John Ashbery’s celebrated poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” It is a very generous collection comprising 119 poems divided into five distinct sections with helpful notes for the reader at the end. It also includes almost all of the 22 earlier poems in the series, originally published under the title Love in a Time of Belligerence (Éditions du Cygne, Paris, 2017), so that readers now have virtually the complete series in one volume.

The spectacles on the cover underscore the shift from self-portrait to witness. A self-portrait is something that depicts or says something about the person who produced it but a witness is not that same person but A. N. Other, a person who observes something first and then speaks up about it, if necessary, in a court of law. Tabios uses this substitution as a vehicle to speak out about many of the world’s pressing issues as well as other themes that are universal in their scope. Less noticed perhaps is the shift from the indefinite to the definite article in relation to the convex mirror. A witness can only observe things through his or her own lenses, not anybody’s lenses. We should also note, in “Beautiful Lovers,” how Tabios makes a distinction between the use of the indefinite and definite article citing how words shift from the general “a” as regards pleasure to the specific “the” for the pain. This is a collection that is full of pain (and sorrow) for our world.

Tabios refers to her sequence as being a series of “riff-offs”—a neat contraction of two ideas revolving around the concept of a rip-off (a slang term meaning to exploit or to steal from something) and a riff (a term frequently employed by jazz musicians to imply a phrase that is played repeatedly or a theme that is subject to improvisation). Both meanings are particularly relevant here where lines have been borrowed from another writer in order to free-up the imagination.

In these poems, Tabios achieves a “leaping effect” —that is, she leaps from one topic / image to another in much the same way that the mind leaps from one thing to another in quick succession. It is rare for an image to last the length of a poem. It is more usual for several diverse images to be contained within one poem.

Convex mirrors reflect light outwards, therefore they are not used to focus light. Such mirrors always form a virtual image, since the focal point and the centre of curvature are both imaginary points "inside" the mirror that cannot be reached. As a result, images formed by these mirrors cannot be projected on to a screen, since the image is inside the mirror. The image is smaller than the object, but gets larger as the object approaches the mirror. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, they provide a wider field of view as they are curved outwards.

When Tabios looks into the mirror, she does not just see herself.  There is nothing narcissistic or egotistical about this volume. Instead, she sees certain aspects of human nature and our fallen world, areas that we would rather not see. Her poems speak out against sexual violence, cruelty, injustice and slavery. They speak of disengagement, deception, drug abuse, pollution and promiscuity.

Tabios takes two expressions from the art world to act as titles for sections I and III in the book: they are Abstract Expressionism and Cubism Color. In simple terms, the former may be defined as subjective emotional expression with particular emphasis on the spontaneous creative act. The poems in this section certainly read as if they have been fired off at white heat. The latter may be described as a perspective with a single viewpoint abandoned and use made of collage. Tabios certainly weaves together a collage of facts culled from newspaper articles, internet sources, TED Talks, quotations and popular song.

Expressions of concern for the future of our planet frequently surface in poems such as “History” (“We break / proven ancestral wisdom by taking more from / the land than what we give back to it. Then we /  scar the planet again with laboratory-made / pollutants impossible to compost”); “Living in the Micro, not Macro” (“We’re no different from the Ross Ice Shelf (and / the rest of Antarctica) as the planet warms / around it”) and “Ravished in the Raw” with its commentary on the plight of bees (“how chemicals and other human-made / pollution are destroying their habitat, / causing them, in turn, to destroy more habitat”). In “Anthropocene” she writes “Watering lawns / is no longer an innocent exercise…Turning on / the air conditioner means bleaching  / the corals of the Great Barrier Reef. / Your lover’s thoughtful gift of sea salt / for your culinary affectations? A bounty / of microplastics”.

Tabios moves seamlessly from serious philosophising to light-hearted humour. The consequences of baring a nipple in public is ingeniously conveyed through the image of an Arthurium in  “Mundane Ass-Ette.”  Other examples of her humour can be found in “Poetic Legacy” and “Betrayal with Brand Names.”

The season is quite often winter and with it there is the association of ageing and mortality. At least three poems have the word mortality in their titles while other titles such as “The Temporal,” “Raging Against the Dying Light” and “R.I.P. John Ashbery” hint at it. In “Living in the Micro, not Macro” she writes “ We’re past / the age of boozing, drinking and drugging as if /we always will be slim, fresh-faced and smiling” and in “Queen Anne’s Lace” she remarks “To be young is to be beautiful/ and so we were”. She writes starkly about the deterioration of the body as much as she does about the deterioration of the planet.

Sometimes, whether by accident or design, a correspondence can be found between one poem and the next one in the sequence. For example, roses inhabit both “Synesthesia” and “Aura” and buds inhabit both “Mundane Ass-Ette” and “Ravished in the Raw.”

The recurring preoccupation with a varied vocabulary of roses, perfume, financial terminology, human physiology (especially the face and the hands) in Section I gives enormous satisfaction, making these poems stand together rather than apart. There is less cohesion in Section III although the financial terminology remains.

In Part II, which acts as a kind of interlude, Tabios hands us some light relief (if you will excuse the pun) on the subject of male masturbation (quelle surprise!). With characteristic humour, she lists all the synonyms she can find for this act and, in so doing, gives us another example of one of her “list” poems. For readers who struggle to see how this fits into the framework of the whole book, however, there may be a serious point here. Our abuse of the planet also includes, as viewed by some people, our abuse of our own bodies. Taken to excess, it may be viewed as one more example of selfish gratification.

Part III addresses issues to do with gender, race and politics. It is a searing account of the world in which we live. Topics covered include the politics of negotiation, war, climate change (extreme weather events: melting icebergs, super typhoons) and facts about why we should love trees. One of the most powerful poems in this section is “Euclidean Geometry” in which Tabios addresses the following conundrum head-on:

…we are insects within a universe whose

eye turns at random to our hairy tibia wriggling

for attention, only to react with indifference. After

all, our major powers bomb others then return

with aid. Or, we aid others before bombing them.

We are not reliable.

                                    Then we build museums

complete with notecards beside each image of naked

girls running down stony paths, their wings burning

and mouths screaming loud enough to tear down

centuries. We read the nearby notes and feel

what are unwritten. We return our eyes to fire

in backgrounds, as if distance from our eyes

can cancel their existence. Our eyes return to

foregrounds and we cringe from smelling burning

flesh. How to return to the origin of our race

before we became impure from living? Or are

we fooling ourselves by believing, in the beginning,

we were charged with good behavior?

So that each fire that’s since flared can be

attributed to misbehaviour—an approach that

offers the relief of explanation?

Part IV addresses another range of current issues: everything from sex dolls to robots, and the cleaning up of the Fukushima disaster. In “Lord, Please Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do,” Tabios ends with these two lines:

how parents must grieve other what they birthed.

How God must truly anguish over us!

Part V rounds off the collection with four “Excavated Tankas”, that is tankas that have been formed from specific phrases taken out of longer poems where the remainder of the text has been struck out. 

In this collection, closely paraphrasing lines from "The Ascetic’s Secret," much is captured in the convex gaze, including things we ignored during our yesterdays but now will be part of our conscience. Not only is Tabios a poet of words and actions, she is also very much a poet of our time. Recommended.

*****

Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014), Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017) and Punching Cork Stoppers (Original Plus, 2018). His work has been translated into several languages.

JACK & AGYU by JUSTINE VILLANUEVA and illustrated by LYNNOR BONTIGAO

REYNA DAUDIAN Engages

Jack and Agyu by Justine Villanueva and illustrated by Lynnor Bontigao 
(Sawaga River Press, 2019)

BOOK LINK

Receiving the book Jack and Agyu by Justine Villanueva is such a thrilling moment for this reader of Bisayan, Pilipino, and English upbringing~ mabuhi tanan.

Seeing the Baybayin characters in the front cover with two Brown boys from different shores facing each other with their hands meeting upon greeting each other

Urban youth meets the islander youth

~ it is a time of celebration

Nakahilak ko sa lipay

I am in tears of joy!

As a young child I grew up with multiple languages: Bisayan, Filipino Tagalog, and English. Our Mom was born in Bukidnon and after her Father went MIA as a recruited USAFFE soldier (we never met our Lolos as they died during WW2), our Boholana Lola returned to Bohol with her 4 children.

Both my parents are Bisayan: Mom with roots from Bohol and Dad was born in Cebu. But us kids were born in Quezon City and raised in Marikina, with wonderful childhood memories visiting our Lolas and relatives in Bohol and Cebu via overnight barco rides. As young kids, we were taught to prepare coming to America and practiced English at home and in private schools.

We immigrated to the USA and reconnected with our Dad a year after our Dad left  for the USA and landed in California in 1981.

This is such an amazing book to behold in my hands, rooted from the heart of islander ancestry and the future of mixed relations ~ mga halo halo .

With careful attention to indigenous authenticity and respect to the indigenous peoples of the archipelago, Justine and her team has done a marvelous job of endless beauty.

Nakahilak ko

I am in tears with joy to hold this beautiful halo-halo reading. A well thought out format in addressing indigenous relations. Those of us with halo-halo ancestry is acknowledge with much thought and love for future generations. 

A wonderful experience to open up the book with its teachings of diverse islanders’ language and images

Grateful for Balik sa Dagat Bangka Journey’s collaboration.

*****

Reyna Daudian or Mylene ‘Leng Leng’ Amoguis Cahambing, RN, PHN, MPH is a Vision Holder/Lead Coordinator/Blogger, local county PHN Public Health Nurse, a former foster care public health nurse, retired pediatric nurse, community health nursing instructor ~ Maayo pag-abot. Tuloy po kayo. Welcome. This is not just about bangka building, carving and design. it consist of stories of many along the way,  new experiences and living dreams. it is a blessed gift, the umbilical connection with our ancestral roots unfolding with each step, the highs and the lows of the tide. forgive me if have intruded or have made a mistake. i come and go with peace in my heart to share happiness, joy and the spirit of love. i am learning with each step i take. kitang tanang magkuyog adto. let us journey together. magpadayon ta sa pagpangandoy. daghang salamat po sa yaya ko atsaka bisayan interpreter ko, si bernarda baobao taga tanday, baclayon, bohol. ~ ako si leng leng, i am leng leng