Zero Gravity

by Eric Gamalinda

"Like the earth on its silver axis," Eric Gamalinda's poems spin into a "light that is our consolation," and are all the more moving for their startling recognition that "the jacaranda in bloom is changing the landscape of Los Angeles." These are wonderful luminous poems. — Arthur Sze

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1999

About the author

Born and raised in Manila, Eric Gamalinda first published in the Philippines four novels: Planet Waves, Confessions of a Volcano, Empire of Memory, and My Sad Republic; a short story collection, Peripheral Vision; and a collection of poems, Lyrics from a Dead Language. All were written and published in the last decade of the twentieth century to literary acclaim and recognized with National Book Awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards many times over, on top of his nonfiction and plays. His fifth novel, The Descartes Highlands, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize. His other US publications include the poetry collections Zero Gravity, winner of the Asian American Literary Prize, and Amigo Warfare; and a short story collection, People are Strange.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Day 24 of The Sealey Challenge

Gamalinda's themes: childhood in Manila, moving to the US, Phillipines and US landscapes, religious iconography and faith, family reflections.

[d · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dry basin of the moon must have held
the bones of a race, radiant mineral,
or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy,
idea-pure.

If we stepped out
Manila would be blank ether, a way station,
a breathless abeyance.

An all-time favorite. Gamalinda writes with the quiet resignment of someone who has fought against and surrendered to the love contained in all things (earthly and divine). As an immigrant, he writes of being grateful to leave Manila, leaving him with both guilt and freedom. It is a feeling often overlooked for most diasporic writers write of missing home. He does not. With this, he writes about the American mundane with a love, deference, and romanticism that only a third-world pair of eyes can. There is a silent cathartic exhalation in having traded humid Manila for the fragrant cold air of New England, soulless though it is.

In contrast to the earthly humdrum of daily life, he frequently employs vibrant, bursting imagery: Catholicism, the terror of angels, Andalusia, and Lorca. The mundanity and vibrance complement each other, seamlessly woven without tension by the thread of the human condition--to love, to leave, to yearn, to suffer. An astounding collection of poetry, every single one ruthlessly beautiful. Reminds me of Evangelion and Rilke.

[june · Rating 4 out of 5]

whoa

"you loved no one else, you loved me entire."

"between you and memory / everything is water."

"I’ve decided to write nothing
but prayers from now on, if that
is possible: if asking is all it takes
to find in the axis of our being
the light that is our consolation,
and is temporary, and forgiving."

"everything she remembers
is past forgiving

and hunger creates a halo
the way love lit the heads
of the saints..."

"..history must be implanted in those who populate it,
and we walk by a river whose name has not
been determined, whose source is still mysterious,
still capable of healing."

"What else is there to believe in now, / when all else fails, and the boundaries of the world / invade the room we lie in?"

"he is learning
the landscape of language where there is no
fixed geography, and everything
still evokes another memory:"

"so that it comes to me informed with the wonder
of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel,

as though I were one of many a weightless absence
touches,"

"or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy, idea-pure."

"and all that is left is a life-like replica / in which bone fragments quietly work their wonders. / Faith has a way of distorting the senses,"

"his is the way history and memory // invade each other, like wars waged after visions."

"relentless loves // that may have scorched into our hearts / the way the saints accepted stigmata."

"not deliverance but the sly / moment that invades / our bodies"

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

How have I never learned about Gamalinda before? The artful way he weaves the mundane with the ephemeral is so intoxicating and so hypnotizing. It's masterful, how he spools us away into the atmosphere with musings on the grandiose and the religious and the theoretical, and then, just when we're feeling almost too unmoored, he slides a reference into a stanza about something so common and so universal, yet told in a beautiful way, that we are tacked back down to earth. And so begins the dance again. Truly gorgeous.

[ven · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am always learning the same thing: there is no other way to live than this, still, and grateful, and full of longing."

immensely glad that a random poetry foundation deepdive a few years ago led me to this collection's titular poem among a few others. it did not disappoint. beautiful beautiful work

[Taiyo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Underrated classic. This book should have hundreds of 5 star ratings. If you know, you know. ZERO GRAVITY, BAR NONE!

[Dextro Juan · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've been reading a lot of poetry book these days and i saw someone in ig recommended this one! omg it's so good and i didn't know that a fellow filipino wrote this one. ❤️

[T. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excerpts from a journal entry written 23 January 2007:

...I love this fact, this nearing towards the end. I am grateful, most of all, that there is an end.

***

I realized that I love to look at people reading...I guess I caught the habit. When I'm at cafes, or odd restaurants, bookstores, trains — I noticed that I can't help but look. It's not only the eyes that I notice, but their expressions while they read. They're so naked, their faces.

***

I can't believe I'm looking for my life, swept around somewhere, in the corner of my room, maybe hanging like my bra on the bedpost, maybe in the bottom of my waste basket, maybe tucked between Roubaud and the Travel Guide to Switzerland. And there is a poem somewhere that I can't write:

When the Heart Flies from Its Place
Eric Gamalinda

The names are the first to go,
then the dates of births and deaths.
It's as if everything moves on another,
esoteric level, here among the gravestones
where the elements collude so we don't realize
how we succumb to forgetting. The milkweed unfolds
its damascened leaves and monarch caterpillars
devour them scrupulously, and out of this simple act
something marvelous is already happening,
the promise of a massive and silent migration.
Order is natural progression: a century from now
the sugar maples planted by the pioneers
will still be growing, too ancient to remember
everyone who's seen them here. This once
was a church, where now two benches meet
in mute conviviality, and this a pound for stray sheep;
one village will be mowed over by another,
one more road will cut through the forest here.
A tractor roars to say the conquest is complete:
we tame the land until it accepts
our habits, our fear of need. When I hear these sounds,
says Stansik, age five, my heart flies from its place.
Just eight months in the country, he is learning
the landscape of language where there is no
fixed geography, and everything
still evokes another memory: cowdung is
smell of village, a pond is primal, rippling
with translucent newts. The stones
say little of these former lives, just that
they once were valiantly loved;
you can almost hear them calling the roll:
Thompson, Merritt, Thayer, each a perfect
solitude, a stilled comet. Stansik again:
Why are there no blacks in Massachusetts?
And: You are not black but gray. Pretty soon he'll forget
his Russian, the language he is slowly
inventing, the man from whom his mother
had to run away. I wonder if he will remember
this summer, and how the heart feels
when it flies for no reason other than
—what was it? I didn't know, I had never learned
the word for it, and to this day I walk
the unspeakable territories.

I think I need more Brubeck now, and less of Nina Simone.
My heart's too full.

[Patricia Lucido · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rarely do I read for fun, nowadays. Seldom do I read poetry on a whim. But first, thank you to my professor in Intro to Western Lit for suggesting books for me to read. (I admit that I haven't read any of them except for this one haha).

Anyway.

Poetry. Poetry by Eric Gamalinda.
I'd have to say that my experience in reading Gamalinda is minuscule as compared to the other authors, but after reading his play, The Anatomy of a Passionate Derangement (and I loved that play, btw), and his poetry collection, Amigo Warfare, I thought, "Wow. This guy's writing style is really effective in transforming me into a mess of a writer."

#Hugot = 8/10
The poems know what hurts. The poems know what makes you hurt. The poems hurt you.

#Narrative = 9/10
Tell me a story in verse, actually tell me all your stories in verse.

#Imagery = 9/10
The persona is a traveller and you are his suitcase.

#Final = 4.5/5 stars
It. Hurts. Ouch.

[Laurelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

So much of this book speaks to a deep part of me I thought I'd hidden. It's one of the books I'll be revisiting for the rest of my life.