Past mountain dreaming : new essays / Gemino H. Abad.

Past Mountain Dreaming comprises thirteen essays on poetry followed by three "historical overviews" on our poetry from English and a concluding essay which sums up the author's reflections on his own poetic and critical practice. His "poetics" assumes that the poet's singular aim is the perfect word-weave as lightsome or as deep as the thing that the mind has perceived, imagined, or intuited. Apart from the significance (saysay) of the poem's subject or theme (paksa), which is basically an interpretation, what is as crucial is the manner of expression, the poet's own way with language whereby the poem's "soul" or meaningfulness (diwa) is forged or endowed with its distinctive form: that is, the exact configuration of what has been experienced, imagined, or intuited. Such a poetics is only one possible theoria: that is, a particular standpoint or way of making sense that flows from certain basic assumptions about the nature of the literary work as both work of language and work of imagination. In the sciences, and more so, in the humanities, any theoria has its own explanatory or heuristic power for its proper object, but is valid only insofar as it serves its purpose; thus, as to its currency, it has a certain life span during which it may take on various refinements and transformations.