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by Oliver de la Paz (Author)
"My father forfeits field and nation / and I dream nothing into these turning skies." In 1972, after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, Oliver de la Paz's father, in a last fit of desperation to leave the Philippines, threw his papers at an immigration clerk, hoping to get them stamped. He was prepared to leave, having already quit his job and exchanged pesos for dollars; but he couldn't anticipate the migratory lifestyle he and his family would soon adopt in America. Their search for a sense of "home" is evocatively explored by award-winning poet de la Paz in this formally inventive collection of sonnets. Poems flit with dulcet lyricism and nostalgia from coast to coast, across prairies and deserts, along the way musing on shadowy dreams of a faraway country. With a virtuoso's deft touch, The Diaspora Sonnets break and rejoin poetic tradition, powerfully capturing the peculiar pangs of a diaspora "that has left and is forever leaving."
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There is no container more fitting to the conveyance of the nuanced sorrow of the permanent displacement from home, a word 'ensnared with thorns, ' than the sonnet, certainly as it is practiced by Oliver de la Paz, in metrical couplets, with shimmering music, 'the syllables of story, // saying then, then, then, ' and a splendorous catalog of details, acutely remembered, and gilded into metaphor. ...The tenderness in these poems comes through in their 'gradations of memory where one // belonged, ' and in their penetrating artfulness, itself a kind of love.
--Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets
