Adam David's The El Bimbo Variations is remarkable and noteworthy because it contributes to Philippine literature in English and Philippine literature in Filipino, to Philippine poetry in English and Filipino, to critical and translation theory as well as art criticism in these two languages—all at once. By choosing a passage from a Tagalog pop song as the “vortex” around which would spin the 99 “Oulipian variations,” David not only sets into relief the irreducible otherness of the local vis-a-vis the seductions and insinuations of the translocal; he also demonstrates translatability as the strict function of citation and performance. That is to say, the book shows, often humorously though not for that matter unconvincingly, that the illusion of comparability across languages and cultures is the direct effect of the repetitive imitation of the original, which itself is revealed to be an idealization that can never be achieved, only ever so slightly approximated. And so, while the variations may have initially derived from the notion of arithmetical permutations, the very act of translation across languages, media, cultures, levels of culture, verbal registers, discourses and poetic traditions that the book prodigiously performs introduces the dynamic of indeterminacy and “freedom” into the scene, which thereby worries the exactitudes of mathematical analogy. In a manner of speaking, El Bimbo may be said to have, in the end, all but completely dismantled the procedural Oulipianism which had spurred it into existence, utilizing poetic agency to constrain poetic possibility and yet arriving at the realization that subjectivity is inescapable, even as one attempts to effect its effacement. It is important to say that none of this would have been possible if David had chosen a “universal” English passage as the originary text; indeed, we may surmise that, for this particular book, one of the author's cleverest and most salutary decisions was the inaugural one: choosing such a culturally specific and wonderfully resonant passage to be tinkered with and rendered “various” throughout the series—a passage that indeed offers a wealth of affordances, chiefest of which may well be the postcolonial. Linking up notions of the Musal and the indigenously beautiful ( Paraluman ) with the ideal of an irretrievable childhood brings up the matter of nativism, a backward-looking and mythopoetic enterprise that formerly colonized and desperately decolonizing cultures have invariably experienced and endorsed. Amazingly, what El Bimbo ends up suggesting is that such an exercise in atavism and nostalgia is—as postcolonial discourse itself often reveals—as necessary as it is untenable… Because it dramatizes the search for pristine originality as a calculus of hybrid and proliferative differences, we may say that this book has immense and “disruptive” contributions to make to the understanding of our unfinished history as a neocolony, as well.

The poems in Victor Dennis T. Nierva's debut collection, Antisipasyon , happen in the ambiguity that sprawls numinous between the terminals of departure and arrival. This is the contact or liminal zone where the freight of meanings and the languages that ferry them are kept in perpetual abeyance—prayed for, expected, glimpsed at, and yet never quite shapely or certain enough to be known or grasped by even the most eager of interpretive hands. The wonder of it all is that in the company of Nierva's fastidious and implacably situated imagination, this transitivity across languages and worlds becomes not an experience of pathological and pointless delay, but rather itself a passionate journey over the unforgettable landscapes and through the inscapes of earth-bound thought and ascendant feeling. Because they resolutely accentuate the event, materiality, and specificity of their Bicolano provenance and ground, Nierva's poems never quite leave the place of their nativity even as they transfigure it into the universal of all true Art.

Upon 1st reading, Alan Navarra's Girl Trouble may seem too easily written, too facile w/ its rants & konyo whining w/c perhaps partly makes it attuned to what Peque Gallaga hesitates in his introduction to call "the zeitgeist." It is also what makes it easy to hate: anger w/o verbal sublimation, heartache w/o subtlety in words. But such a dismissal would also be too easy, too irresponsible, for the book calls attention to a property of language that has been mostly taken for granted by most writers: physicality, materiality. For Girl Trouble requires not only a 2nd reading, or a 3rd, or an infinity of readings; what it requires really is careful  looking -- an endless series of lookings -- an act we rarely accord a work of literature. It reminds us that before a word can signify in the abstract, it must first exist in space as an object -- be it in sound or in type. & it does so w/ the use of a myriad verbo-visual grammars, from the ubiquitous storyboard more familiar to those immersed in film & TV production (w/c is most everyone these days in this age of integrated advertising anyway) to the almost Surrealist juxtaposition of graphically designed words against pictures that don't have anything to do w/ them, a tip of the hat to Magritte. One can go as far as say that keeping the plot deliberately simplistic -- flat, if one may say so -- is a most deft technique for shifting the audience's attention away from story to the means of telling the story, Godard aiming the camera away from the narrative & towards the camera itself. To say that the book makes up in eye-candy what it lacks in sophisticated storytelling is to admit that we are possibly insufficiently equipped w/ the tools to approach such a challenging text that not only code-switches from word to picture, not only code-switches from English to Tagalog to Ilonggo, but engages all of them simultaneously -- & to be able to raise such a pertinent admission is already such a huge contribution in itself.

In The Proxy Eros , her first poetry collection, Mookie Katigbak recurs to poetry's oral source and fashions her own kind of exacting and insistently percussive lyric out of the discord between sound and sense. We may describe this discord as a gap, a distance or absence of proximity between symbol and meaning that paradoxically makes possible the poetic, which in Katigbak's utterance is often synonymous with the tangential, the ambivalent, the imprecise. What emerges again and again out of this slippage is the astonishment of language and of versification as a substitution of shadow for substance, of feeling for truth, of shifty rhythm for the stasis of possession and certitude. Indeed, heard more closely, the poems in The Proxy Eros seethe with a bright and breathless approximation that, while premised on incongruence and loss, reveals itself not only as the heart of the lyric moment, but also as the beautiful incompletion that sighs from within human love.

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