Jewels as yearend gifts
From among the unprecedented outpouring of books this year, I choose to call attention to three of the most recent literary titles. They’re fit to be called jewels for potential holiday gifts—partially on account of a private joke involving a couple of namesake writers who have been among the most fluent in their respective genres.
Over a decade ago a foreign lady wielded an accent that transformed the poet’s name into “jewel”—and the laugh-in that ensued stuck to my recall of fun times.
The first two titles I’ll cite in this space are actually the back-to-back produce of another Joel, whose favored genres have been the essay and fiction.
Joel Pablo Salud’s View from the Foxhole: Shaping the Political in the Personal, published by UP Press, presents essays written in 2016-17. Despite the time that has passed since then, the selection may still serve to track the evolution of the author’s perspectives as a journalist.
In her Introduction, Inday Espina-Varona justifies the collection’s full title thus: “Joel’s journalism is literary in nature… Beneath the grim landscape, the writer toils to mine hope from the depths of fear. The gems are served best when Joel takes on the role of a storyteller.” All right, gems equal jewels.
The earliest essay is dated June 29, 2016. The rest proceed till March 2017. His takes on the newly installed president from Davao City are unmistakably cautious, not tentative but understandably fair, especially since they were being written when he was then editor-in-chief of Philippines Graphic magazine. Even when the reports started coming in on the increasing number of EJKs, Salud holds back from his foxhole, allowing Gen. Bato dela Rosa early leeway for possible naivete.
For the most part, his writings dwell on philosophical questions encountered by journalists, even as these relate intimately to his personal background. It would be interesting to follow his evolution as showcased in his latter collections, such as I, Journalist, and Other Newsroom Instrospections, published in 2020 also by UP Press, and nominated in 2022 for the National Book Awards in Journalism.
A prolific writer, Salud has authored 13 books (four as e-books), apart from conducting yearly lectures on journalism ethics in colleges and universities. He also writes opinion pieces for PhilSTAR Life and a series on writing for San Anselmo Publications.
Another recent title has Salud venturing into futuristic fiction, with Specimen Zero: A Science Fiction Novel, published by San Anselmo Press. Editor Danton Remoto provides a blurb: “Anime, computer games, social media and popular culture commingle in this fantastic novel. An intellectual thriller, it ranges widely from Greek and Mesopotamian myths to the threat of a nuclear doomsday. It’s a fun and well-written novel worthy of your precious reading hours.”
We could say that an erstwhile distant political view has lurched on from the foxhole towards a more caustic rendering of the recent past. The Prologue offers: “Much of the capital has been reduced to rubble by the draconian regime of the former despot, Roderico Trayson. His friendship with the People’s Republic had opened the country to China’s invasion of the disputed islands, and ultimately, the Philippine capital.”
Set in 2039, plus 400 days, the narrative segues from “The China-America-Japan All-Arms Stand-off at Mischief Reef, which eventually led to The Third and Last Great War.” This is upon discovery of a strange, seemingly lifeless creature by a Filipino foreman and his team of German engineers “at the old Trinoma Complex.” Specimen Zero “was female, in her mid-twenties, taller than the average Filipina, with dark hazel-green eyes and straight plum-red hair. … Further tests show that the specimen was cold-blooded, hinting of reptilian biology.”
As it turns out, she isn’t dead at all but very much alive, and mutating. Soon the teams of scientists and military officials encounter “the rampage of a creature that had dislodged humanity from the apex of the food chain.”
Related as a potpourri of scientific and investigative reports, military accounts, video transcriptions, socmed chatter, philosophical and mythical engagements, the novel ranges from our Bakunawa to the Fibonacci Project involving the spiral theory of evolution.
From Specimen Zero, it’s a gemstone of a leap between literary genres to Planet Nine from UST Publishing House, the fifth book-length poetry collection by Joel M. Toledo, whom I’ve long regarded as among the very best of our contemporary poets in English.
It isn’t just his garland of distinctions that sets him apart, albeit they make for a proper introduction: Palanca, NCAA, and Philippines Free Press awards, The Meritage Press Poetry Prize in San Francisco, USA, and as the first Asian to win the Bridport Prize for Poetry in Dorset, UK. He was a fellow at the International Writers Program in Iowa, USA, and has twice been a recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Creative Arts Residency at the Bellagio Center in Italy. “Jewel” also supervised the Monday-night readings at MagNet Gallery Bar-Café for several years, and is now Resident Fellow of the UST Center for Creative Writing and Literary Studies.
But let us have his remarkable poetry speak for itself. Among my favorites in his latest collection is the poem “Saying,” which starts: “Perhaps a word is no more than the sum/ of what charges it. So that/ whatever static it once carried dissipates,/ its task relegated to mere placement/ on the page/on the tongue.”
What separates Toledo from our other outstanding lyricists is his determination to probe into the inner workings of fragments that make up a whole, in more metaphysical a coursing than mere description of setting or subject. His landscapes may be foreign, as in his curtseys to Japan and its oddments. But he does not confine himself to graphic description, rather steps in to live and reflect on the experience from inside out.
Here’s another part of “Saying”: “It’s like peering past what/ the light can reach. Like into a well/ in the mountains. What do you make out/ apart from where brilliance ends/ what do you see”
And from “Ukiyo”—about Hiroshige: “He thought as well, how good it must feel/ to reach inside the hollow of a tree trunk/ and press his fingers on its underside,/ to insist on one’s presence in nature without/ disturbing it….”
Or from the prose poem “[Fix]”: “Perhaps the trick is in examining the root word/ Begin with fixture then let the noun/ diminish past the thing into its function. To inspect/ is to rely on the infinitive, no more than/ a finitude. … But repair/ is a verb, likewise a noun. We must gather around this pairing.”
It isn’t enough for Joel M. Toledo’s poems to glitter on the strength of tone, diction, quiet music. It is the carat weight of introspection that matters, even as this has to turn into the commerce between past and present in this or any other planet, as when “Hiroshige/ lifts himself up and pushes on toward Kyoto,/ his mind now on buyers for some old prints.”
Another poem is titled “Athazagorapobia.” Ironically, Toledo has no need to harbor the fear of being forgotten.
