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By: Ricardo M. de Ungria Anvil, Manila 99 pages BY: OPHELIA A. DIMALANTA
Ricardo M. de Ungria’s “Waking Ice” is a sequence of 53 poems addressed mostly to the poet’s late son Nikos. It is a disturbing collection about a son’s journey to addiction, attempts at recovery, then to self destruction even before he turned 23. In it, De Ungria draws a gamut of emotions from his own parallel experience of trying to understand, rejecting and accepting by turns. It closes with a final impassioned, albeit hushed, cry of despair. The volume is divided into four parts, each separated by two blank pages, staring at the reader vapidly. The first part begins the travails, the discovery of Nikos’ addiction, the dawning realization he hardly knew him at all, even as “I am face to face with you who are here/inside my shadow, tearing your way to burst out/a trail of lies and paint/Who are you?” Quite overwhelming are the poet’s avowals of love alongside pains of betrayals, remonstrances and refinings, quite defensive and guilty insinuations he has given much from his end, expecting little, and getting almost nothing in return. The prevailing atmosphere is the vast vacancy of “icy space rubbing against summer suns, silences in the toppled dark. He forages around for reasons as he lovingly, painfully reels off images and sounds of father-son moments, all the while making desperate attempts to have the son hold on, not to let go, and for himself not to let him go, through lies and broken promises and his own waverings between rejection and acceptance, resentment and love, no matter what. “I must take you back/in, splinter/to my woodwork of soul.” So death is here even before it has actually reared its ugly head. The sense of alienation devastates, growing more intense from one crying poems to another. The second part deepens this growing sense of estrangement, “ strangers on edge, shoeless with suspicion/and expectation, bargaining for truths/and half-truths, gritty with guilt and recriminations.” The bitterness in both sides remains, and even then, as the son languishes in the Rehab Station, father already had this “taste of death he kept to himself, savoring it down to its last bit between his teeth.” The pain of separation is so naked, this sense of vacuity seeping into all the sounds, carrying the son’s own vehemences, out-raged silences. “We have burst/indeed apart.” The denunciations are loud. But louder yet ware these attempts at reconciliation, a final coming together, with promised prospects of better times. Just as loud is the defensive tone, pervasive all throughout. “We will tune the old guitar you strum, I sing.” The voice is heartwrenching. “We will do it yet/piece by piece…” The leash image hands on. “The dog Bono, lollipop to kids/ this part of Dart street …/ I look into the blue/inside his eyes/and think of you/loose with your leash/ still looking for home.” Futility The futility of it all comes as a silent moan extracted excruciatingly from the poet’s soul: “I fought back tears/ when it dawned on me/ that different constellations shine/ beyond our shared skies.” The third part is made up of nothing but two poems, the news of the son’s death and the poet’s own reaction as he flies to the morgue, the cracking up, ice crushing on ice, the breaking down, uttered with such Nerudan seething: “Dead or alive, one is here alone forever.” Too direct? No matter. It strikes us as one inevitable explicit utterance expressing that ultimate strip, the irrevocable loss coming just too soon. The ghost of the son is sought in every possible cranny and detail surrounding his emptiness, a breeze slipping in, a moth, the heat of his need impaling the loved one’s absence and wished-for presence, catching it only for it to turn into cold air and a shiver, “a breath of random sky/trapped inside me/ and wouldn’t let go.” There could be mixed reactions to this much awaited book. Some of De Ungria’s readers who had already read it even before it was launched were all praises, and tended to speak in superlatives as they were wont to every time they reacted to the poet’s works. But there were comments like: this time the poet bent over backward, a little too uncomfortably in favor of life over art. Too close to subject. Too personal sometimes that the lines just poured away unrestrainedly either in runaway metaphors or slack prosaisms that become too discursive for comfort. He had never written like this before. Perhaps this was on account of the nature of the subject? These could be the possible comments from the other side. But what do I thinK? What do I think this time? Distinct Cry The whole collection is one distinct cry (silenced or shrill) of pain. How does one contain a cry? Does one shed it to unrecognizable tatters in the name of what is normally accepted as art? Should it, this pain, have been couched in the most concealing metaphorical dazzlements, tempered, refined, subtilized into an unfamiliar specter of the original pain, its authenticity subverted? Isn’t art supposed to hold emotions at bay, depersonalizing, re-familiarizing, foregrounding and whatever have you? Again, more questions. Poetry comes in different colors, voices, persuasions, intents and according to its particular need, sets and seeks its own terms in its critical assessment. Finally, there really is no cut and dried formula for poetry, and for art in general. “Waking Ice,” by the nature of its subject, entails a more or less affective response, a valid response in spite of Wimsatt and Beardsley. This kind of poetry calls for a most intimate and volatile form of literary discourse. It has to achieve a degree of accessibility to produce the necessary immediate intense and unsettling kind of exchange between poet and reader; to preserve this emotional impact of loss in a predominantly bleak universe (inner and outer) of nothingness, void, in different shades, estrangement in different voices. The poet, thus, becomes at times nakedly explicit and at other times figuratively evocative, the tension finely held throughout. The success of this kind of poetry lies in the mutuality of poet and reader, reader and poem, and not exclusively in the complex play of metaphors and symbols, although there are still instances of such, a De Ungria trademark. Poetry is supposed to create its own autonomous world, and the good poet works around and within such creative confines. The subject matter of “Waking Ice” is something no lesser poet, or any poet less confident in his art would dare to handle, afraid he may be of the risk of either excessive emotionalism (mainly through outright statemental outbursts) or assuming such distance, that the result may not bring about intimate commerce between poet and reader. This, to date, could still be De Ungria’s most compelling output because it very evidently connects. It gives the reader this heartrending gift of a shared encounter, privacy, participation. Life and art. The best poems hold allegiance to both. And, at this point of art’s evolving,
we should be ready to concede its occasional tenuousness and its invulnerability
to criticism.
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