NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW: "TO SING OF BEAUTY AND LOSS"

North American Review (NAR) is the oldest literary magazine in the U.S., founded in Boston in 1815 by journalist Nathan Hale and others.  And NAR has taken notice with a review which we reprint below, with NAR's and Editor Vince Gotera's permission:

Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets, ed. by Eileen R. Tabios, Meritage Press, 2014, 220p, paper $20.00 • Note: I review this book although I am in it because all profit from the book goes to groups engaged in disaster relief in the Philippines. • This anthology collects literary poems by Filipinos at home and also in the diaspora. Many of the "big names" of Filipino poetry are here along with many emerging and also beginning poets; I won't name them because of the occasion of the gathering. What's important is that these poets came together in community and solidarity so that poetry can achieve what it often does better than other genres: to witness, to sing of beauty and of loss, to give solace and succor. Eileen Tabios has ordered the poems into a narrative that includes not only the immediacy of the typhoon and its destruction but also the environmental damage that surely led to its birth. Please buy this beautiful book for yourself and your friends. Thank you.

From "Synecdoche: Brief Book Reviews" by Vince Gotera, North American Review, Volume 299, Number 2, Spring 2014, page 48.

To remind, Verses Typhoon Yolanda can be purchased from Meritage Press' Lulu account HERE.