Puti/White
Puti/White explores the past in places buried under layers of shifting reality. Here a poet searches for her lost roots – partly remembered, partly imagined – where language questions the everyday and probes the persistent difficulties of preserving the personal from the pull of the public world. These poems seek to capture the voices that lie within, those engagements of the particular with the universal that spark moments of grace.
Awards/Award Nominations
Winner: Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for Trillium Poetry Award
Reviews
Patria Rivera has clearly been indelibly affected by both the largely-charged and the everyday. She brings both to bear in her poems. Through her taut, intelligent verse, the reader can imaginatively access other geographies and uncommon encounters, created from the matrices of general history and personal memory. ~Elana Wolff, surface & symbol
This is Rivera’s gift, this ability to reach into a remembered time with utmost ease and clarity – delineating pain, divining life. ~Remé Grefalda, Galatea Resurrects
Puti/White chronicles the exile’s condition and the conditions leading to exile, without guile, nostalgia or pity. Right from the bilingual title of Rivera’s very fine collection, which was justly a finalist for this year’s Trillium Prize in poetry, oppositions exist in unquestioned justaposition: home with exile, belonging with exclusion, torture with moments of breathtaking and breath-giving grace… An absorbing and promising first book, Puti/White suggests an alternative to homelessness, inviting us instead to be multi-homed, learning the past by heart without wearing it on our sleeves. ~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail
Puti/White is a compelling book of poems by Filipino-Canadian writer Patria Rivera, which dance us through a world rich in lyric, colour and vivid imagery… Certain images, often dark, run throughout the book – the repetition of references, such as the heartrending “Naomi in a shoebox”, add to Rivera’s explored notions of disappearance and exile, poverty and silence. War, women and language are examined in their relation to the nature of the Earth. Among many things, this book is a marriage of the living, the dead and the ghosts among us hidden in language. ~Jocelyn Grossé, Fast Forward
This may be Ms. Rivera’s first full-length collection, but she’s obviously been around the block a few times and she was a delightful discovery for this reader. ... Quite simply put, this is an excellent book, and a most welcome debut. Not since Rienzi Crusz’s debut, have I tasted such rich language and succulent turns of phrase. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
In poems both tough and tender, Patria Rivera explores the notion of exile – from place, culture, and language – with passion, precision, and wisdom. This is a book to savour. ~Helen Humphreys
Patria Rivera has clearly been indelibly affected by both the largely-charged and the everyday. She brings both to bear in her poems. Through her taut, intelligent verse, the reader can imaginatively access other geographies and uncommon encounters, created from the matrices of general history and personal memory. ~Elana Wolff, surface & symbol
This is Rivera’s gift, this ability to reach into a remembered time with utmost ease and clarity – delineating pain, divining life. ~Remé Grefalda, Galatea Resurrects
Puti/White chronicles the exile’s condition and the conditions leading to exile, without guile, nostalgia or pity. Right from the bilingual title of Rivera’s very fine collection, which was justly a finalist for this year’s Trillium Prize in poetry, oppositions exist in unquestioned justaposition: home with exile, belonging with exclusion, torture with moments of breathtaking and breath-giving grace… An absorbing and promising first book, Puti/White suggests an alternative to homelessness, inviting us instead to be multi-homed, learning the past by heart without wearing it on our sleeves. ~Katia Grubisic, The Globe and Mail
Puti/White is a compelling book of poems by Filipino-Canadian writer Patria Rivera, which dance us through a world rich in lyric, colour and vivid imagery… Certain images, often dark, run throughout the book – the repetition of references, such as the heartrending “Naomi in a shoebox”, add to Rivera’s explored notions of disappearance and exile, poverty and silence. War, women and language are examined in their relation to the nature of the Earth. Among many things, this book is a marriage of the living, the dead and the ghosts among us hidden in language. ~Jocelyn Grossé, Fast Forward
This may be Ms. Rivera’s first full-length collection, but she’s obviously been around the block a few times and she was a delightful discovery for this reader. ... Quite simply put, this is an excellent book, and a most welcome debut. Not since Rienzi Crusz’s debut, have I tasted such rich language and succulent turns of phrase. ~Richard Stevenson, The Danforth Review
In poems both tough and tender, Patria Rivera explores the notion of exile – from place, culture, and language – with passion, precision, and wisdom. This is a book to savour. ~Helen Humphreys
Samples
The scent of mangoes on a lazy afternoon
On the verge of a summer solstice
bunched green rice stalks
point arrows of precipitation
from streams that shoulder out the river;
tilt and shift of wet slate
river rock
hover of sulphur in an orange afternoon
resined breath of Grand-Aunt Ela
hatching mangoes golding under a bed
warmed by bodies of callow women
their rumps of sorrow
penance for barrenness of bedrock
precipitous mass
seeding the everyday corners of the day.
Silence levels the dark
birdnip and tuck of small hours
hide my forebears’ flagrant predilection
for warm musk of ripeness
quick-scatter of tears
while they wait solemn as bats for their quarry.
Geography class, 1960
We roamed streets we first drew in Grade 4
learning the topography of monsoons.
La Loma,
our barrio, grew like a lichen on the foothills
of Sierra Madre Mountains. The Second World War
scorched its brown knolls into a suburb
of Manila’s illustrious dead, made even more
infamous by a huge cockpit, and pigs skewered
on bamboo spits, roasted for everyone’s celebrations.
Cocks and crows, pitogo trees and banyan roots
scuffed shadows on aureoled tombs, bloated urns,
crosses, sandstone angels, shrivelled maggots,
mausoleums, crypts piled on top of one another.
The scent of frangipani trailed humid evenings.
After the war, American soldiers decamped,
left us their Quonset huts, their taste for PX goods.
We did not bury our dead here.
They would’ve felt strange in this city of niches
and clapboard houses. The betting in the cockpit
would’ve drowned all grief:
Sa pula, sa puti –
the red and white cockfights crowing our luckless lives,
my aunts’ wailing – erased the small consolation
of a sky always blue.
