Birdcatching in Sagada and other Poems (The Philippine Writers Series 2021)

At the onset of the amihan or the northerly winds, Sagada boys used to practice ikik or birdcatching on top of Mt. Ampacao and other mountains. They would hold high nets and torches to catch the migratory birds riding on the Siberian winds. Sagada would later outlaw ikik when the avian flu became a pandemic, but some residents still practice it. Poet-journalist Franklin Cimatu not only wrote a poem about ikik but also used it as a motif for this first collection of poems in English. He caught the poems that flew from the North: poems about his parents, the Marcoses, Cordilleran revolutionaries, Hawaiian sacadas from Candon, and artist-friends from Baguio. The poems follow his flight path in journalism from the early 1990s up to the 2010s. His subjects are mostly the people he covered. He scoured his old notebooks, newspaper clippings of typhoons, journals of old European explorers and the New York Times on the day he was born. This book is also a very personal collection. Many of the