Jose Garcia Villa's Doveglion book is particularly special to me, because it marks the inclusion of my uncle Ernesto Manalo's poem "Parable" (tucked almost all the way in the back of the book as one of two poems in the "Prose Poems" section).
I never met my Uncle Nesto. He committed suicide, well before I was born, at the age of 26 after a long, scarring bout with (as he put it) "the state called psychotic depression." He had an enormous talent; elsewhere Villa called him "one of the most important Filipino postwar writers." In the preface to his posthumous Selected Poems (1962), he writes:
I believe that poems are always products of neuro-pathological states, that is, a neurosis. If this is not true of other poets, it is certainly true with me, because I have been undergoing psychiatric treatment since I was twenty (the age when I started writing poetry)...And he concludes: "I present the poems in this book as poems, not as testimonies to an illness."And that is why I have been led to believe that the melancholy... is a natural component not only of my poetry but of all kinds of poetry. I think it is in the nature of the poet to have his melancholy as a form of concentration. It is in his melancholy that he reigns supreme, and through which he controls his art. If there should be order in the poem, it is the melancholy in the poet that gives this order...
...I believe that the poem while being a direct product of the poet's neurosis is not a symptom of this disease; on the other hand, I think the poem is the outward sign of the poet's strength -- the poem is the point of departure from the illness.
Here's Uncle Nesto's "Parable" in full, which still breaks my mom's heart everytime she reads it.
And I wanted them all around me and I gathered them:
My brother (my keeper) my wife, my mother and my father.
My father said: I will stand by and watch over you.
My wife slept beside me.
My brother watched over me with the scientific mind.
And my mother was my spiritual keeper.
And I said: You who thus watch over me will get no reward
But that I shall sleep peaceful.
And they said: We shall watch over you and expect no reward
But that you shall sleep peacefully.