Kaluluwa : new and selected poems / J. Neil C. Garcia.

Kaluluwa turns the tables on traditional disquisitions on the subject: the speaker of these mournful meditations, these terse and urgent lyrics is the self-as-body, mortally aggrieved, and looking to its soul for assurance, for consolation, and finally, for a restitution of its fragile claims in life, for a kind of resurrection. What may be said to distinguish Kaluluwa is its attempt to interweave metaphysical and animist accounts of spirituality, wagering everything on the necessary unity of all corporeal knowledge, all embodied imaginings of the soul. Variants of the story of a garden, where a god and his creations suffer the pangs and reversal of love, may be found in many oral literatures of the world, and indeed this story is at the heart of this poem-cycle as well. In the end, the poems in this collection demonstrate how, despite their indulgence in things bleak and unavailing, a bright seething, an ardor and love for life and its ongoingness, can and do manage to whisper past the tempest of the here-and-now - deep into memory's transfiguring calm, our luminous hereafter.