One Hundred Love Poems: Philippine Love Poetry Since 1905

This anthology comprises love poems in English by Filipino poets over practically a hundred years from 1905 to the present. The aim is to give a long view, as it were, of the experience of love in our own time and place: not so much the concept or abstraction as, from poem to poem, the living, the experience. As the Introduction puts it: "About love and the chemistry of its weathers, they are never wrong, the poets.... Nothing is false in the clasp of their verses, for their truth is never absolute but contingent: the unarguable truth of individual experience. 'The only reality,' says Jung, 'is the individual': that is to say, the reality that every man or woman knows in her heart and in his bones, and central to that reality is the experience of love." Book jacket.