A Wanderer in the Night of the World: The Poems of NVM Gonzales Edited by Gemino H. Abad

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"NVM Gonzalez recalls 1934 in Calapan, Mindoro: I was out of school, too strapped to afford university tuition. Was it in relief or from sheer optimism that I took to composing poems? Whatever the reason, no one could tell me what a poem could look like or how it should be. One day, a ferry boat came with my copy of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse [January 1934] perhaps the first to ever reach Calapan. In fact, there was no one with whom I could share my joy. I was nineteen and had actually sold my first poems. No one in town, for that matter, could honor Harriet Monroe's check for six dollars. Unearned self-confidence, illusory independence, and peace of mind perhaps. But the poems were there attesting to something at the very least. And I may have been unable to return since to that pristine condition."

Thus did NVM's writing life began: verses all wrought in the morning of our poetry from English, in quiet industry and humility sprung from the simplicity of country life and a closeness to the liberality of Nature which he often celebrates with such freshness and simplicity of expression as we find in "Behold the bountiful land" and "What moves the corn to summer fruition." But already evident are the subtlety of perception about his subject or theme and the economy of the word-weave that we find later in his fiction; and there is too that sly humor in such verses as Sandoval and Inday. For NVM, the subject or theme is the most important in creative writing, for it is the fruit, as it were, of a process by which you discover, he says, "the archetypal" in the living moment that Mircea Eliade calls "sacred time" that synchronic moment where you begin right where you are. From that point, and inward, so to speak, things have happened. So you know what to look for, what to expect to find." - Excerpts from the publisher's website.

About NVM Gonzalez
NVM Gonzalez was born in the island of Romblon, Philippines in 1915. Besides three novels and five collections of short stories to date (as of this writing, when The Bamboo Dancers was written (1957), -- The Winds of April, 1941; Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories, 1954, A Season of Grace, 1956; The Bamboo Dancers, 1957; Look Stranger on this Island Now, 1963; Selected Stories, 1964 and Mindoro and Beyond, 1979 - he has published an autobiography, Kalutang: A Filipino in the World and a collection of essays, The Father and the Maid. In 1947, he joined the English Department of the University of the Philippines where he taught for eighteen years. He was Visiting Associate Professor of English in 1968-69 at University of Hong Kong. For nearly eighteen years, he was based at California State University, Hayward and held visiting professorships at University of Washington, Seattle and University of California, Los Angeles. NVM Gonzalez had received several awards for his writing, which includes the 1954 Republic Award of Merit for Literature in English, the 1960 Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the 1961 Jose Rizal Pro-Patria Award, the 1989 Gawad Pambansang Akagad bi Balagtas (Balagtas National Award) and the 1990 Gawad Para sa Sining for Literature (Award for the Arts).

In 1997, N.V.M. Gonzales was named Philippines' National Artist for Literature. When he passed away in 1998, The NVM & Narita Gonzalez Writers' Workshop (NVMNGWW), a non-profit organization was established to honor the life and works of two remarkable persons who devoted their lives and professional careers to writing and education. Nestor Vicente Madali or simply NVM (1915-1998), a Philippine National Artist in Literature and for whom the writers' workshop is named, was first published when he was sixteen and continued writing and publishing until 1998. Only death kept him from his work and self-proclaimed mission of articulating the Filipino world through literature. Narita (1920-2016), his wife started as a writer as well, and spent most of her professional life as an educator. She has authored several children stories and essay anthologies. Her devotion to NVM, to his career and her four children, made for a partnership in work and life that influenced many students, colleagues, and personal friends. In honoring NVM and Narita, the Workshop hopes to continue their good work in supporting and encouraging fiction and nonfiction writing as an expression of life and culture, beyond its communicative functions, but also as a link to each other, as Filipinos scatter throughout the globe in diaspora, so that their sources of inspiration and the purpose of culture are remembered and honored and inscribed in literature.
A Philippine import. Limited copies available.

ISBN/ISSN: 978-97-1-542787-6
Publisher: University of the Philippines (2015)
Pages: 146pages
Size: 6x9
Weight: 230g


C.E.