(From High Chair Issue 10)
Depending on one’s nature, composure, when confronted by the terrifying or the mysterious, may be considered one’s salvation or cross to bear. And depending on yet another’s predilection (for example: mine) in the face of composure, one may find oneself stymied in her response. Nothing like composure to make one hesitate over whether a counterpart good behavior is the effort’s due or its defect.
The Proxy Eros (Pasig: Anvil & Fuji Xerox, 2008), Mookie Katigbak’s first full-length collection of poems, much like the universe in it and its magical re-making, encourages the former. In her review of the book releases of 2008, Conchitina Cruz has called Katigbak a poet of composure, citing the speaker in “As Far as Cho-Fu-Sa” as the epitome of calm. “What I am, ever, is this: composure of stone.”
“…[Katigbak’s] poems exact quiet attention from the reader; Katigbak writes with admirable clarity, her lines noticeably mellifluous, their smoothness turning the constant evasions and missteps governing erotic entanglements into a kind of dance. At times the earnest lover pining for an absence…, at times an outside presence admiring the beloved as she turns absent, eluding the pursuer’s gaze…, the unwaveringly eloquent dominant speaker in the poems is consistently astute in observation and virginal in sensibility, simultaneously innocent despite knowledge, clear-eyed yet steeped in the magical, stating with certainty, in “Sleights,” “It was the real that was marvelous.”” (Cruz, 2008.)
It is clear in the collection that Katigbak is technically adept at smoothing out “all [her] difficult and contradictory feelings” (ix) and, the book is a capable testament to the polish that its governing intelligence can wield on this haphazard, awkward, “makeshift world.” (“Intermediate Geography”).
Throughout the collection, Katigbak’s tool of choice—the potently metamorphic mind, transformation in order to tame this unwieldy world—is palpable to the reader. The root of the persona’s composure stems from the decision to speak not only after the storm, but after the storm has been deliberately studied and reformulated, casting upon the tempest her generous, unwavering, and interpretive vision. Of things beyond her control, which the persona is fully cognizant of, there is a consistent effort to stay their affliction, a hunger to have “all suspense / suspended”, a hunger for the “bedrock certainty of what’s next” (“The Inevitable Place”). To the persona there must be virtue in it, so that the poems in The Proxy Eros often take us directly to the remade state—smoothened out, deliberately arranged, and tidy. They spare readers the tempest of the journey. I realize, however, that much as there is pleasure in the equanimity that arises from the well made and the well arranged, what I find intriguing is this feeling I get of a counterfeit composure.
Read the rest of the review here.
