There is something palpably warm, and at the same time, cold, about these poems in the collection The Highest Hiding Place (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009) by Cebuano poet L. Lacambra Ypil.  In a book of six sections, composed of at least five or six poems, he traversed the luminous experience of going in and out of a familiar landscape—a home perhaps—but somehow a place where habitation is sweet and light, despite the fact that real living and existence are more of planes of various contradictions. 

This collection is in itself an ode to habitation, an ode to home, where the heart is, as they say.  But what mostly gathers here with domestic bliss is primal experience—something untamed albeit brimming with generous wonder.  In the journey that is Ypil’s book, one is being reminded of the sheer irony of the abode, wherever it may be: it is both embracing, but at the same time keeps its door shut.  One of its poems, “House” talks about this paradox, rather deftly—

A kind of wanting

it was.  A kind of not

wanting… 

The collection is a landscape of the particular, of the familiar.  It thrives in images of beaches (there’s so much water here, curiously), of village (middle class?) people, gardens and greens, and of course, homes and their intimate nooks and crannies—a library there, a piano by corner, the porch, some well loved trees, the whole family, with of course, the strong female figures. 

The book is inhabited with so much life and vigor that one can actually hear the children’s laughter at a family gathering which seemed to have gone wrong at first, in the poem “Porch”.  Towards the end of the story of a nudged glass, we could sense a lot of tenderness in the insight:

How could we not love what it cost?

Crack on the marble floor just set,

dent on a polished

kitchen door.  A small window

overlooks the children. One nimble,

one frail, balancing on the far

edge of the porch.

But a journey had been taken, and by extension, a home had been left.  In this book, we are seemed to be brought back, not only to nostalgia, but also to those meaningful but primal places of home.  The first poem in the collection, “The Discovery of Landscape”, embodies a sense of wonder to a witnessing of the new—a city being discovered (or rediscovered perhaps), described to us as a “(l)ine of the tall spires and the bend/ of a bright sky.”  Both space and time are recalled in this lyric moment, where the persona enjoins an addressee (perhaps the reader) to gaze at a personal history (“Look.  There…”) and make that initial gesture of stepping back.  The need to do so is in the main, the heart of the collection.  The persona utters this necessity in a fleeting manner too, where words speed their way towards the natural gravitational pull of their concepts.  The past in itself is fleeting, and the experience of the poem reiterates this timeless truth:

We named it progress.  The past

Was not warm, so we named it dead.

We named everything we could not touch

Passed.  We believed

again in what was large.

Might of the long road and

the risk of the big wish…

Ypil’s crafty hand created for us sterling lines of benevolent seeing, keeping the utterance as homey and as primal as it aspires to be.  In shimmering language, controlled and finely cut, pieces of home had been steadily re-imagined for us.  For in reality, it is only in the highest hiding places where we indeed come to return to our truths.  The in between-ness mentioned previously makes this collection a superb read among the latest book of poetry released recently. -end-