The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa

Filipino-American Villa (1908-1997) was something of an anomaly, in that he wrote as an ex-pat of a colonial property of the U.S., yet was as unquestioning of the premises and practices of high modernism as he himself was of his abilities and preternatural calling as a poet. The most prominent echoes in the poems, stories and essays collected here are from writers as diverse as Hopkins, Dickinson, Blake and Cummings. Villa's various innovations--his idea of ""Reverse Consonance,"" and the later (taken only half-seriously by his contemporaries) idea of putting commas between every word--seem minor in retrospect compared to those of Williams or Pound. Yet the purity of his approach allows him, at his best, to escape the more fiery, hieratic tones of his earlier poems, and yet access the integrity of the small event: ""Silence is Thought converging/ Uprecipitate, like/ Dancer on tight wire balancing,/ Transitive, budlike,// Till--her act finished--in/ One lovely jump skips/ She to the floor, bending/ To make her bows, dips// Herself in bright applause--"" The comma poems challenge the reader to break apart and reform meanings, as if to dissuade the imposition of final interpretation that eventually weighs on many poems: ""As,much,as,I,perceive,the,Future, / Lo: the,Future,perceives,me: / A,Mutuality, of,Eyes."" This book, expertly edited by Tabios (Black Lightning), is a study in how a relatively small contribution to two nations' literatures can challenge the terms of current debates about the West's imposition of values on non-Western peoples. (Feb.) FYI: Villa's The Parliament of Giraffes: Poems for Children Eight to Eighty, with original drawings by the poet, will be published next month by the Filipino publisher Anvil. The edition is lovingly edited by John Cowen, and translated from the Tagalog by Larry Francia (Casa Victoria, dist. [687 Newark Ave. Jersey City, N.J. 07306-2895], $25 120p ISBN 971-27-0833-0; $15 paper -0832-2).