The Anchored Angel: Selected Writings by Jose Garcia Villa
Eileen Tabios, Editor.

This book is a delight. The sampling of Villa’s experimental and visionary work is good. The memoirs and essays at the end of the book are superb. One writer wonders why Villa does not appear in contemporary anthologies of modernist and postmodernist anthologies and posits the “otherness” of Villa as Philippine-American as the cause. I agree, but also suggest that Villa’s “wrestling with God” in the sense that Hopkins and the 17th c. Metaphysicals did, did not endear him to the decidedly secular critics of the latter half of the 20th c. This book also includes short stories and Villa’s own criticism as well. Deign of the book is good, and the title poem is worth the price of admission alone. Read this book and rediscover a minor master.

The typographic experiments of e.e. cummings (a major crush), inspired Villa to insert commas between each word in certain poems and thus to invent a new and exciting kind of writing both in the visual look of the poem and the sound of the poem upon its performance. Villa claimed that “comma poems” required a new kind of appreciation from its readers and provides in this book a manifesto to tell us exactly how to achieve the required level.