Hiraeth

In these twenty-six complex, finely-crafted poems, we see Eileen Tabios at the height of her poetic powers, fighting, changing, and embracing two languages to wrest new meanings not only from the words themselves, but from hyphens, slashes, and empty spaces. Sometimes intensely personal, sometimes fiercely political, Tabios plunges the reader into a universe of ecstatic images as she repeatedly attempts to freeze each ‘inevitable stutter of love.’

 

—Mary Mackey

 

Layering memory soaked through with heart / home sickness where ‘paper is too / soft a field for your hand leaving my waist,’ Eileen Tabios’s HIRAETH: TERCETS FROM THE LAST ARCHIPELAGO mesmerizes. With its title borrowing the Welsh word for the feeling of homesickness tinged with grief expressed for dear ones departed, the collection is partly inspired by British painter Andrew Bick’s series of multi-layered wax paintings wherein each layer presents new imagery as well as ghostly images of older layers. Just as an Archipelago Sea is studded with so many isles, each of these poems arrives so ‘studded’ with some lines intentionally faded out as though possessed by the ‘Unreasonable ghost of a ghost / who’d persuaded the world its name is Unicorn’.  There are recollections, imagined or not, of ‘poetry readings where I ripped pages / from my books. Sometimes I autographed them; sometimes / I crumpled them into balls I’d toss towards the audience as / if they were money or my underwear’ seeking ‘to alchemize the reader into / the author!’ Maybe the poet, too, needs to be reminded out of amnesia: ‘I forgot my poetry is going to change the world … I forgot my words are holy. / I forgot my words will lift you—all of you!—towards Joy’. But readers should never forget the fruit of such devotion to poetry. How terrific to have it here at hand.

 

—Patrick James Dunagan