Merlie M. Alunan started her literary studies as a scholar of eighteenth-century Romantic Literature under the fabled tutelage of Edilberto and Edith Tiempo at the Silliman University Graduate School of English. She took to heart the dictum of the age, which was that the poet should be seen as an individual distinguished from her peers by the intensity of her perception and the inner workings of her mind. These, plus what William Blake called “Imagination, the Divine Vision,” powered the British romantics. But Alunan merely used this learning as a net to sieve her manifold experiences. She has transformed them into feats of invention both linguistic and lyrical. The persona in “Bienvenida” writes: “New tales now sit in your memory hoard.” And this is what Tigom: Collected Poems has done. The poems have such precise diction and strong narrative lines. Internal rhymes echo down the pages. The political and satirical poems have the sharpness of barbed wires. This is poetry of many layers—landscapes and seascapes, history and memory, filaments of feeling vibrating in the very air. Tigom: Collected Poems cements the reputation of Merlie M. Alunan as one of Asia’s finest poets. —Danton Remoto, author of Riverrun: A Novel and Winner of the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas * * * In this breadth of Alunan’s ongoing lifework, we are reminded that just as living is an act of faith fierce in its steadfastness so, too, poetry that matters needs no grandness—as tangible as a bodied life surviving through love in the present, looking back kindly at the past, and holding its breath towards the morrow, these poems make the ordinary especially luminous. To read this collection is to have finally received and taken on the invitation to come on in, through the front door, yes, fellow traveler warmly welcomed. —SHANE CARREON, author of Then, Beast and Winner of Academy of American Poets College Prize * * * This phenomenal collection shows the range, the depth, the stamina of an artist who has quite literally written about everything, and written things into being like very few people can or have: bravely, and fiercely, and deeply, and unsparingly. Everything that Merlie Alunan’s senses land upon becomes poetry so vivid, so sharp: a bunch of keys in a jar, dusty crystal glasses in a closet, an empty room curtained with fine webs of silk, wind and water that come in the form of rain and floods and waves that cleanse and kill but “keep no memory,” the bells that toll for a desaparecido priest and for the Balangiga revolutionaries; a girl and her tattered dolls, a young man in a jeepney, a Japanese potter bent over his wheel, old lovers bent over breakfast in the harsh light of morning, boys and girls “drinking the sun on their golden skin,” the stunning dictator’s wife who shopped while people died, the now ubiquitous images of bodies taken by gunshot in the streets. Each time you look up from the pages of an Alunan work, the world is irrevocably changed. Whether it is of womanhood, or manhood, or childhood, or nationhood that she writes of, Alunan evokes a reader-response of a sharp intake of breath, a pause. One comes away from her work always with a keener understanding of phenomena and of everyday things, a more intimate knowledge of the ever-changing body, of the other and the self. Which is to say that one comes away from a Merlie Alunan poem with a sense somehow of agency, of power, because she provides us “the idioms of depth and silence,” for anger, celebration, desire, or grief. The poems in this collection span decades and multiple languages and styles. They cross political and personal realms unsparingly examined and scrutinized. To read these poems together in this one book is to be gifted intimate access to an astonishingly engaged and generous lifework that is unparalleled in our time. —DARYLL DELGADO, author of After the Body Displaces Water, winner of Manila Critics Circle / Philippines National Book Award

1. Philippine poetry (English)