In Praise of Wilderness Poems (The Philippine Writers Series 2021)

On the moving and provocative force of ambiguity, these new poems by shane carreon have come far from his initial crossing of threshold in travelbook (UP Press, 2013) and have come through the grappling with uncertainties in Then, Beast (UP Press, 2017). In these poems, the enduring sense of the familial, the historical, and the intimate offers ambiguity in itself—through lyric transformation—as an unsettling form of clarity where farseeing is weighted by a certain lightness of memories and futures and the disturbing tenderness of provisional deliverance. “The poetry of shane carreon upholds and sustains a seemingly magic pause between density and lightness. At once cerebral and passionate, these poems collapse the too easy boundaries between sea and sky. shane is the poet of the ‘in between’. He knows the science of trespass and the trip wires our language and cultural exchanges entail. The word wilderness once meant the place of ruin and death. Then it became, through the Industrial