Brief Notes on Jaya Jacobo’s Arasahas
Thomas Leonard Shaw I have always been fascinated with poetry that traverses the terrains of the physical, natural world, and attendant to the world of experience, of the spirit. I enjoy poetry that casts enchantment, not just necessarily from allusions to magic, specters, or other figurations of mystical otherness, but through the very experiential energies of a persona grappling with a world at once familiar but also made strange, navigating a philosophy and poetics of a self in flight, tender but strong, intimately engrossed with its own knowing and unknowing. Jaya’s Arasahas inscribes visions of life that constellates a universe of intimate understanding and linguistic entanglement.
The way I have approached the collection is through an act of “slow” reading. This method eschews the urge to finish the task of interpretation as soon as possible, cognizant of the collection’s steady mapping out of a verse world premised on both Jacobo’s rich sense of place and shaped by her understanding of mobility as a fulcrum through which the poetic image bares either the quiet and restorative or the confident and disruptive powers of language. In “Mosqueiro,” the persona begins with a declaration “Ito pala’t ito nan ga/ang dulo ng mundo” followed by observations of the quotidian entangled with the meteorological, of the many natural forces that weave the persona’s, and thus the reader’s, relationship to the world around us. This offers a space of performance for the recurring spirit in the collection, of the endless struggle to not only understand the worlds of our vision, but of the insight that all-knowing is secondary to the affective capacities of poetic knowledge and spiritual encounter. In “Stony Brook Souvenir,” the poet masterfully demonstrates that this sense of worldliness is not limited to locale, but cognizant of the transnational mobilities of her memory and verse, an illumination of the ability to transcend the physical borders through the evocation of places as diverse as the Appalachians, Long Island, Philadelphia, and the personae at the heart of each encounter.
In Jaya Jacobo’s “Paloma,” the image of the observing persona and the pigeons in the park articulates a poetic discourse contingent on movement and the figuration of a desire that plays out the intimate and varied dimensions of worldliness, spirituality, and the recollecting self. Suspended in this poetic scene, a fluid dance between wanting in the world and wanting the world, is a narrative logic that clarifies the poet’s own personal histories. Jaya reveals a masterful ability to strike deeply and carefully into vulnerability while never neglecting the world of and around the poet. Her writing and rewriting of the inner and outer dimensions of experience is made possible by a language carefully nimble, purposefully creative, skillfully guided and yet pliant to her performance of (and reflection on) enchantment. The flying pigeons, to my mind’s eye, represents an aspect of Jaya’s work, of a being in flight, an ascension made possible by language, while always in view of both the mystery of what lies ahead and the perpetual embrace of memory from behind.
If I had to describe my love of this collection, I first must point out the coupling of vulnerability and bravery, that each of these poems signify moments in the poet’s life vulnerable and open to the joys, the sorrows, and the uncertainties of a writer always grounded by place but always imaginative, always aspiring flight in language. Each poem is a testament to a sense of craft born out of a natural ability to poeticize, sharpened by the years and the worlds of Jaya Jacobo’s life. I am made more excited for her future traversals, her continued journeys in a life I have always admired, and for her courage to keep moving forward while always looking back in gratitude. This is a tour de force, and I am eternally grateful for Jaya Jacobo’s poetry and her steady poetic presence.