ABOUT THE BOOK

The book contains poems written by the author in English between 1987 and 2020. Much of it contains the author’s memories of Tacloban City and life experiences long before the occurrence of super typhoon Haiyan, his brief visits in Osaka and Kyoto, and sojourns to towns and cities in Leyte and the nearby islands. A few bring back memories of Haiyan and the deluge that devastated the author’s city. A number deal with folk beliefs prevalent in Leyte that the author holds as his own truths. According to Dr. Jaime An Lim, a critic, professor, poet, and fictionist, “[This] collection deals not only with the devastation of Super Typhoon Haiyan that visited Tacloban in November 2013. Its thematic concerns range over a wider and richer territory: the persistence of memory, the legacy of childhood, the blend of folk beliefs, folk tales, and folk ways that continues to color the lives of the contemporary Warays.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Victor N. Sugbo is a poet in English and Waray. Residing in Tacloban City, he has published three books poetry with the UP Press. Poems from Ground Z contains his poems in English. Gimata, his latest Waray poetry collection, was published by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts in 2022. In 2018, his poetry book, Taburos Han Dagat, won the National Book Award for Waray Poetry. In 2011, he was granted a writer residency in El Gouna, Red Sea where he completed a poetry collection. In 1997, he won first prize in poetry in the international poetry competition sponsored by the Thornton Literary Agency in the U.S. He has edited five books for the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He has a Ph.D. in Communication and had been a professor at the UP Tacloban College.