Review

Conversations with my mother
on the poetry of Eileen Tabios
by Aileen Ibardaloza

The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes: Our Autobiography
poetry by Eileen R. Tabios
(Marsh Hawk Press, New York, 2007)

My mother spends a third of her day Reading.  Which she does with absolute intention. When she reads her bible, for instance, she takes particular interest in etymologies and immediate contexts, in connectives!  By her side: an Exhaustive Concordance and an Expository Dictionary.  Which is to say, we don’t share the same reading list, she being heavily into theology and music and health.  So I will never forget this day, the 27th of September, when she picked up a poetry book and began reading, “O Heart, my father…,” 1 in a voice softly punctuated with understanding.  Listening to her, I saw the poem from reference frames I had not considered before.  “She gets it,” says my mother.  And that was how I started my Saturday, discussing Eileen Tabios’ poetry over morning coffee with my mom.

What Can a Daughter Say?

I stand here before you.  That I am alive makes me insufficient evidence? 2

That my mother sits before me, reading poetry, having survived the loss of her piano, among other things, is sufficient evidence.  Of love, among other things.  That she remains gentle and forgiving – O Heart (which is also my mother’s name, translated into Spanish: Corazon).

My name is Eileen and I will not be jailed inside a poem. 3

How can you not want to ‘migrate’ to a poem when it gives voice to your hopes, knowing “hearing is the last sense to go”? 4

That I always wish to sight said loyalty and said sky / does not compensate for the impossibility of your body / pressing against mine behind a sand dune / while children laugh from a reel outside our movie / discerned gratefully to bring joy within our frame / and waves throw up white lace bonnets across the surface / of a sea we would know only as a scent of salt / familiar via musk on our skin had we…5

How does it feel to read a history of your own disjointed pasts?

…hear the precursor / fall of / leaves …/ Edit / it down. Edit / it. Edit. / Edit. 6

In “Light”, Tabios has written about grief in forms both painful and necessary, blending into her work a dictator’s legacy, a traitor’s loyalty, an existentialist philosopher’s contemplations, a supreme poet’s three-part allegory, as well as reflections on totalitarian rulers and their murdered thousands, using as tools commodity lists, ekphrasis, hay(na)ku, random collage, prose and narrative non-linearity – all parts of a multivalent sum, the sum being ‘Light’.  Which is also her name and yours, points out my mother.  It is comforting that her poetic “I” includes ‘you and I’, that in between these lines, one might find – dare I say it – one’s own truth (or at least, parts of it). 

“What am I missing?” 7

Tabios’ poetry is ultimately a euphotic zone, that ‘well lit’ ocean layer where “enough light penetrates for photosynthesis to take place,” thus sustaining, and ensuring, life.  Seeing this, singing this, I welcome “The heat / as one writes toward light.” 8

Footnotes

Eileen R. Tabios, The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2007), 11.

p. 12.

p. 20.

p. 99.

p. 36.

pp. 39-40.

p. 103.

p.340.

© Aileen Ibardaloza

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