MANILA, Philippines - Poetry, like traveling, involves escape from the ordinary exigencies of life into the enchanting. A poet can achieve this through his skillful and creative use of words, which makes the commonplace unfamiliar, the ordinary bizarre.

Poetry?s escape and enchantment are evident in Cesar Ruiz Aquino?s verbal gymnastics in his new collection, ?In Samarkand? (2008, UST Publishing House [tel. 7313522; 4061611 loc. 8252, 8278]).

The poems in the book range from the comprehensible to the arcane, from the probable to the almost unimaginable, all spiced up with wit and magic.

The collection is divided into four parts: ?New Poems,? ?Poem-in-Progress,? ?Verseliterations? and ?The Old Poems.?

One can already see shades of the fantastic in the poem ?Eyoter,? which talks about isolation. A reader may at first find it just a jumble of words, with the meaning virtually lost somewhere in the lines. However, such lines as ?I am Eyoter, no other man can do I deem/ A stranger??build up into something strangely familiar.

The dominant role imagination plays in the human mind is tackled in the title poem ?Samarkand,? wherein the persona talks about how his fascination for a loved one has somehow transported them to the city of Samarkand: ?In Samarkand/ On a tamarind/Tree is etched a name/I cannot find/ Anywhere/ Else outside my mind.?

The setting itself conjures images of the romantic and the mystical, Samarkand being an ancient Central Asian city.

Wordplay

Another interesting poem in the first part is ?Ballad of the Ampersand,? wherein Aquino uses wordplay and the ampersand sign (&) in order to show the temporality of events, both ordinary and historical. ?Before the oblivion/was the last stand/& the grand/Standing?Before the star/Crossed the Great War/ Before the Ottoman/Was the Atman.?

The last two stanzas proclaim that the ?Gospel/Even according / To second hand/ Sources will stand/ The test of rock band.?

The second part consists of one poem, ?Jehrameel.? The themes of escape and imagination come into full play with the image of the moon disappearing and how people conjure up their own alternative worlds through dreams. The main character, who is a sleepwalker, goes further by imagining that he goes to a make-believe kingdom in the moon where he eventually meets a girl. All seems real to him until he realizes he has become too engrossed in his dream: ??(N)o one was watching him/ of course, except he, and he had an elf?s/ awareness of this, that he was watching himself/ while down below, the mid-earth rejoiced.?

Old and new

A poet?s creativity does not necessarily mean he should always invent new techniques. Instead, he may use old literary forms and then utilize them in a new manner.

Aquino shows this in the third section, ?Verseliteration,? wherein he takes certain lines from the prose works of his subject-authors and then arranges these in such a way as to create a poem.

Two poems are notable in that they portray the difference between the physical remains and the memory of them. ?Execution Site? and ?The Restoration? are culled from Norman Mailer?s nonfiction novel, ?Executioner?s Song,? about the hanging of the convicted American murderer Gary Gilmore.

?Execution Site? narrates how the memory of the execution haunts Schiller, one of the prison guards who accompanied Gilmore to the firing squad. Despite the passage of time, the warden still remembers the last conversation he had with Gilmore.

?I don?t know what I?m here for,? the warden said.

Gilmore replied, ?You?re going to help me escape.??

One can see here the staying power of memory in haunting the ?actors? of a certain ?historical? situation.

In contrast, ?The Restoration? may be seen as an allegory on the temporality of the physical in its satirical narration of how morticians embalm the corpse of the convict. The episode becomes morbidly ridiculous when the remains ?looked like Gary Gilmore/Again,? even if his body had been badly disfigured by the execution.

The book ends aptly with ?The Old Poems,? which showcases some of Ruiz Aquino?s earlier poems, including his famous verses, ?Stronger Than Love? and ?Riddle.?

Aquino?s poems combine romanticism and surrealism. They employ the verbally arcane, the supernatural, and the fantastic. Despite their verbal dexterity, the verses use overtly or covertly traditional poetic forms, as National Artist Edith Tiempo points out in her preface to the book. In form and feeling, they ring true.