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Welcome to This Lonely World

Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
By Eugene Gloria
(Penguin Books, 68 pages, $15.95) 

By Roy Kamada

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Eugene Gloria’s first collection of poetry, selected as a winner of the 1999 National Poetry Series by Yusef Komunyakaa, demonstrates an astonishing lyrical sensibility shot through, and yet not overwhelmed by, the poet’s sense of himself and his complex series of relationships to culture, lovers and family. Gloria, who was born in Manila and raised in San Francisco, spent a year in the Philippines under the auspices of a 1992 Fulbright Fellowship. He writes a poetry whose themes of transience, cultural and economic alienation, and the difficulties and importance of familial bonds achieve a luminous potency without undercutting or glossing over the horrific legacies of colonialism and racism. Gloria’s poetry links together the postcolonial’s sense of history’s horrors with the poet’s unerring eye for beauty and splendor.

Gloria peoples his poems with characters who are at once familiar and foreign; they present themselves with an intimacy that speaks nonetheless of a profound estrangement, brought on by their place in a world whose postmodernity and postcoloniality alienates the individual from history, culture and family. In the collection’s second poem, “Mauricio’s Song,” the speaker calls his readers into the poem; he insinuates us into the position of witness, and eventually into the position of Mauricio Babilonia, the mechanic and the father of little Aureliano in Gabriel Garcia-Marquez’ Hundred Years of Solitude. In many ways, this poem is typical of Gloria’s aesthetic: he requires us to become part of the world of the poem. Beginning with the scene of Babilonia emerging from a Mobil Gas station, Gloria shifts to addressing the reader, stating that “if you happen to see him / you might remark on the butterflies— / ...fluttering like wayward kites around him.” Soon after Gloria writes that “You could be Mauricio Babilonia,” the doomed lover who is shot in Garcia-Marquez’ novel on his way to a rendezvous with his lover. This kind of rhetorical move is typical of Gloria’s generous method; he seeks to create strange and beautiful worlds in his poems, then bring his audience into those worlds. Such a move is crucial for his greater endeavor to chronicle the nature of exile and diaspora; for in order to bring his readers to feel the full human complexity of that experience, he must first bring his readers into the world of that exile, he must make them, in part, a character in his poetry just as he makes them into a mechanic surrounded perpetually by the fluttering wings of butterflies.

In another poem, “The Whisper,” Gloria writes an elegy for his mother’s father, a village healer. And though the poem mourns his death, Gloria links his lolo’s death with another loss, the loss of culture that comes with succeeding generations’ assimilation into a capitalist culture. For even as Lolo Panta dies alone at home, his daughter, the speaker’s mother, has abandoned “the language of the village,” and instead she has “found / a job at Travelers Life answering phones.” The irony is clear. For the speaker’s mother has let this language whither inside her as she has now taken “up the voice of American movies;” she has abandoned her inheritance from her father, her power to heal. In an ambiguous and complex ending, Lolo Panta whispers his magic words to his dog who, wanders about sniffing the ground while the mother begins her workday leaving her father to die alone. As in the earlier poem, Gloria gives into the complexity of the situation; he avoids any easy sentimentalizing of his grandfather and chooses instead to merely gesture toward the tragedy of the situation, allowing his readers an emotional space to enter into the poem.

Throughout the book run constant themes of journeys and estrangement, of loneliness and anonymity, themes realized, perhaps, most vividly in the final poem, “The Buick.” In “The Buick,” Gloria writes of a man who watched a woman die after her car was wrecked. In many ways, the woman in this poem, trying to say something to this man and failing because of her injuries, stands as a cipher for the poet himself, desperately trying to articulate something “incomprehensible and sad.” While earlier Gloria writes a subtle indictment of silence in the title poem, “Drivers at the Short-Time Motel,” in this final poem the tragic unavoidable silence of the dying woman becomes a silence we can’t help but forgive even as we find it within our own selves.

Eugene Gloria has written a powerful and complex book; part family memoir, part cultural history, but all built on a rich and generous poetic sensibility. He admirably chronicles the flights and homecomings of a transnational Filipino community as well as his own familial and personal stories and inscribes history in his deft and beautiful poetic line.

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