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| The Padsan River in Laoag City, Ilocos Norte, Philippines |
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| View from Gilbert Bridge: Panorama of the eastern part of Padsan River in Laoag City |
by Pelagio A. Alcantara
The poet rages and sings of his milieu.
Peter La. Julian is a respectable poet who burns and chants with a message and plucks his sensitive chord by the side of a river where he grew up and discovered the early sparks of his poetic fire. By accident of birth, being a riverside poet has its added advantage by design: the life and death of rivers is a symbolic struggle between man and his environment from which clash and clime, ebb and flow, the poet draws his material and thematic insights. But beyond the river of one's boyhood is also a range and variety of Julian's powerful voice. Journalist and fictionist, parent and friend, he, too, is government functionary undimmed by the mist of bureaucratic routine. But whether or not the poems in this volume are sermons, elegies or lamentations, always the chief mourner's mood and manner in his own gentle way rues against the "stupidities" of men in the "mid-noon of their separate lives."
At ease with his medium and message, PLJ packs his lines and communicates with the intensity and force of lyric fire. He succeeds most when he ruminates over the summer spell of Padsan River and its massive bridge that connects his sullen city and beyond mocking the puny speeches of a festive folk crawling underneath. But he arouses best when he pokes his journalistic nose for a smell of the gut issues with piercing wit, imagery and sarcasm. His metaphor drips. His irony laced with certain sadness over the "babylons of the world" and the "gods who walk on white feet" in "these isles of songs and poems." He scorns the burdens of bureaucracy as a "wet morning" in the house of public men, cabals and conspirators, "dissecting omissions of the boss" and then looks outside for the sun where "sleep is a beautiful country under a coconut tree."
But no matter what his quarrels with the world are and images he mourns, be that of a Negros child, the fall of a shallow boss, pimps at Las Palmas, Sunday Catholics, foreign exploiters, Kabunian and his brown gods, lure of the hills, tawdry politics, dying rivers, ravaged forests, rape of the multinationals, poet's loss of meaning, dead relatives, or the reign of the new centurions of change--Julian is a nationalist consistently aware of and unfazed by his "enemies within." And in his attempt to redress society, he never fails to blend the luminous line and the nibbling sense of frustration bursting in the seams of his controlled rage.
That is why a reading of PLJ poems singly, or in this volume, is no dull and dense moment. Inspired by a Frostian view of reality that is "deep, dark and lovely," his is a nagging excitement, visceral and cerebral that salves the pain and gross of irreverence, irrelevance and ignorance, pitfalls of parochial poetry and the arrogance of the turbid mind which he tries to avoid with grace and humility.
Like his English poems, the Ilokano versions are silent celebration of clarity and eloquence, even elegance, that require a separate comment and study for a deeper appreciation.
The rage must go on.
*****
It is the Tugade Foundation that sponsored the Tugade Literary Awards. The organization only provides the opportunity/venue for winning writers to receive the cash prizes and the certificates of excellence. No adda idarum dagiti mannurat, awan sabali no di ti TF. We are not custodian of the money. In fact, as of now, the money for the 4th Tugade Awards is still in California. No adda man agkomkomento iti Abel blog, please identify yourself tapno masungbatankayo. Wenno kontakendak iti email: peter.labayog.julian@gmail.com. Kakabsat, it's all water under the bridge.
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| Ilokano icons: Dr. Consolacion, widow of Dr. Godofredo S. Reyes and Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. at an Ilokano writers' convention in San Nicolas, Ilocos Norte |
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