The eyes catch a black bird close to an eerie sun. Instantly, a poem: an accident of composition. Or a tree, rock, light from a story heard, dreamt, read or remembered returns as if it were the only tree, rock, light in the planet. The poet is caught, returned to her first heart: poetry.

After four novels, Merlinda offers seventy-six poems from the stillness of contemplation to the spinning of tales, then to passage across different histories. Glass becomes eternal greens underwater, fish gossip about colonisation, a gumnut turns dissident, and the dreams of Captain Cook and Pigafetta circumnavigate the globe leaving a trail of blood, beads, and the scent of cloves. But in between, the poet hopes: ‘there could be accidents / of kindness here.’

AWARDS

Highly Commended, ACT Book of the Year Award 2018

Winner, Carlos Palanca Memorial Award in Literature (Second Prize for poems from the collection before publication) 2016

To love in a language prised from my wishbone.
To sing a landscape where village girls once burst the moon with giggles.
To dance through the fattest eye of a rice-grain.

To do all these in peace and war is the wish embodied in Merlinda Bobis’ poetry. From her epic poem Cantata of the Warrior Woman Daragang Magayon to lyric reflections on longing, and finally to an erotic dance-drama, Bobis traces the cartography of desire and its intimacy with death.

AWARD

Shortlisted, The Age Book of the Year Award 1999

Ang lipad ay awit
sa apat na hangin.
Ngunit di umaawit
ang panlimang hangin.

Flight is song
on four winds.
But the fifth wind
does not sing.

With the impending wind of war, sixteen-year old princess Daragang Magayon prepares for battle in this epic re-invention of the myth of the active volcano, Mayon, in Bobis’ home province. The myth is about the tragic princess sacrificed for her father and tribe, but as Bobis writes in the preface:

When I considered the mountain more closely … I thought I heard rumours from her wounds of many eruptions. Ancient storylines different from those I had been told as a child. She was singing them.

I listened and began to sing with her.

Merlinda Bobis adapted and performed her epic poem as a one-woman play for stage in the Philippines, Australia, France, China, and for radio with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (1993-1999).

Forty poems, perhaps for singing with the wind — in Filipino and English, Merlinda Bobis sings from falling in love to the social and political exigencies of her times.

Mula Sa Selda Nuwebe

hindi hubad ngayong gabi
itong pader na itim.
nagbihis bigla ng munting bituin,
nang butasin ng iyong titig
ang lamig ng kongkreto—
sige, kukuskusin ko ng mata ang siwang
na para bang amuleto,

bukas, bukas,
mahuhusto dito
ang humuhulagpos tang mundo.

From Cell Nine

it is not bare tonight,
this black wall.
it suddenly wore a tiny star,
when you stared a hole
on the cold concrete—
all right, i shall rub the crack with the eye
as if it were some amulet.

tomorrow, tomorrow,
our world struggling to be free
will pull through here.

AWARD

Winner, Carlos Palanca Memorial Award in Literature (Second Prize for poems from the collection before publication) 1989

i love too beautifully today,
as if tomorrow I will die.

i even tie my hair from cliff to cliff
and invite tightrope dancers.

In her first poetry collection with her line drawings, Merlinda Bobis invites all to rituals of being, breaking and being again — each instance is embodied, indelible:

it cannot let go;
just read my back.

i know — this skin,
this memory of turtles.

AWARD

Winner, Carlos Palanca Memorial Award in Literature (First Prize for poems from the collection before publication) 1987