BY EDISON JOSEPH GONZALES
Poems from three collections that won Palanca Grand Prizes are among the works gathered in Epistolaryo ng Bagamundo at ang Tugon ng Multo, the first Filipino poetry book by Palanca Hall of Fame poet Mikael de Lara Co, launched Aug. 22 in Quezon City.
Published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, the 112-page collection gathers poems written across more than two decades, including selections from three collections that won Grand Prizes for Filipino poetry at the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards in 2008, 2023 and 2024.
Co was inducted into the Palanca Awards Hall of Fame in 2024. He has received six Palanca Awards in all, five of them Grand Prizes, for poetry written in both English and Filipino.
Epistolaryo is Co’s second poetry book and his first in Filipino. His debut collection, What Passes for Answers, was published by Ateneo Press in 2013 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award.
The new book comes after a major change in Co’s own geography. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, he moved from Metro Manila to Cagayan de Oro, where he has since built a life in Macasandig with his wife and three children. He returns to Manila intermittently for work.
That distance from the capital figures into Epistolaryo, whose poems move between the intimate and the historical, and between places both lived in and imagined.
The collection takes up grief in the aftermath of the pandemic, war and violence across history and the former colonies, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the experience of leaving and returning to places once called home. Running through these subjects is a larger concern with how people separated by geography, history and circumstance remain bound by experiences of suffering, empathy, memory and the search for light amid devastation.
At the launch, Co spoke about the book’s genesis and these concerns in a conversation with poet Abner Dormiendo.
Among those present were writers Michael Coroza, Enrique Villasis and Edgar Calabia Samar, all of whom contributed critical blurbs to the book.
National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario, in another of the blurbs, praised the collection: “Sa gayon, tulad ni Baudelaire, si Kael ay isang malikhaing hiwa ng modernidad at maituturing na pambihira’t huwaran ang kaniyang nakasusugat sa gunita na pagtula.”
Samar situated the collection across a wide geography, from Manila and Mariupol to the Mekong and Shuja’iyya, and described it as a continuing dialogue with other poets and other times, asking what language, memory and poetry can still do amid catastrophe and change.
The launch also drew friends from Co’s years working in political communications and the country’s social-liberal democratic opposition, among them former Akbayan Rep. Barry Gutierrez. Sen. Risa Hontiveros also dropped by the event to show her support.
Alongside his poetry, Co is known for his work as a literary translator. He has translated works by Almario and historian Dr. Lisandro Claudio, and Samar’s first novel. Three books he translated or co-translated have been named finalists for the National Book Awards.
For Co, Cagayan de Oro has become both home and a new vantage point from which to regard the places, histories and languages that have occupied his writing for more than two decades.
Epistolaryo ng Bagamundo at ang Tugon ng Multo is available through the Ateneo de Manila University Press website and its official stores.