Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
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- $10.99
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Publisher Description
Ephemeral lives, and souls lost in the tattered fabric of war, displacement, and ruined love find hope, redemption, and a common voice in Eugene Gloria's artful concoction of American and Filipino vernaculars. While some of these thirty poems deal with the landscape and folkways of contemporary Filipinos, others locate themselves on the streets and byways of present-day America. Like many poets of dual heritage, Gloria's work is concerned with self-definition, with the attempt to reconcile a feeling of exile and homelessness. Frequently taking the form of character studies and first-person narratives, Gloria's poems poignantly illuminate the common man's search for connection to the self and to the world."Eugene Gloria's Drivers at the Short-Time Motel is propelled by an imagistic sincerity and paced lyricism. Each poem seems to embody the plain-spoken as well as the embellishments that we associate with classical and modern Asian poetry. Though many of the poems address the lingering hurt of cultural and economic imperialism, worlds coexist in the same skin through magical imagery. Gauged by a keen eye, history is scrutinized, but through a playful exactness. These wonderful poems are trustworthy." --Yusef Komunyaaka
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The speaker in this debut volume poems, "slowly forgetting.../ names for hands, breast, hair and river," has spent time in the Phillipines, and the bio confirms Gloria's birthplace as Manila. His brother (the poems tell us) served in Vietnam. What the poet has to say, in these 30 free-verse confrontations of bilingualism, ethnicity, migration, social class and daily life in the archipelago will hold readers' interest, but many of the poems, while well-constructed, won't exceed family-poem genre expectations: "Milkfish" waxes sad about local cuisine and "sepia-brown photographs" of the author's mother. Another poem says that the poet and his brother "will not speak of wars inside us"; "White Flower" invokes an immigrant husband and "the story he unearths/ from the wilderness within." The second half of this short book is largely given over to such poems of protest, nostalgia and memory. There, the hulks of wrecked American cars, Filipino jeepneys and other motorized transport create a thread of symbols that gives the poems added lift. And Gloria's offbeat, off-kilter, often wonderful phrasings show an inventive consciousness at work: when the sun rises "the giant O assumes a skin of margarine"; of "Mauricio," Gloria writes that "From Mobil Gas he emerges/ like a Mack truck from the desert horizon." An uneven poem about the poet's father yields the pleasing, entirely unanticipated sentence "My lord of facts luxuriates/ in mundane purchases at Napa Auto Parts." The best bits of Gloria can recall August Kleinzahler, or Yusef Komunyakaa, who selected the volume for the National Poetry Series. If the book as a whole fails to live up to the strange, individual standards set by the best three or four poems here, readers will nevertheless trust the consciously accessible, pathos-driven poet who declares, "If there were two worlds we are made to inhabit/ I would prefer the one I was forced to leave."
