Traveling the roads within forty-two poems 1989-2001

• Main Author: Cua, Alice M. Sun
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2001
• Subjects: Poetry > Collections; Writing; Titles of poems; Creative Writing
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/2548
• Institution: De La Salle University

This thesis is a collection of forty-two poems about journeys written between 1989 to 2001. More than 80% were written after the author's Master of Fine Arts courses. The collection is divided into four groups: 1. Physical journeys 2. The absence of poetry series 3. Poems on distance and longing 4. Poems on journeys taken by different personae Fifteen poems make up the Physical Journeys. These poems include those that describe the journeys to China, Thailand, Indonesia, France, Spain and Australia. These trips were taken by the body to new and unfamiliar places, where the senses were jarred by unknown surroundings. More importantly, because of these travels, insights were gained, and these make up the core of the poems of the physical journeys. In this group of poems, the author have written about the physical terrain, surfaces, texture, distance and all the characteristics of the exciting places that could be evaluated by not only the five senses--visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory and gustatory, but also the organic senses of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and the kinesthesia. All these senses have been awakened. The poems, therefore, include a description of how an understanding of the self has deepened, how perceptiveness has been sharpened, and how, in one way or the other, wisdom is gained after the journeys, All the poems included in this section, then, involve a physical transfer, a bodily movement. The Absence Poetry Series is made up of seven poems. They deal with how one can find meaning in the death of a loved one, a journey from denial of the sudden loss to acceptance and resignation, in a ten year period. The Poems on Distance and Longing include thirteen poems where the mind travels to find a connection across distances, as a wife, a lover, and a friend. The Poems on Journeys Taken by Different Personae is made up of seven poems, where the personae travel on the inner terrain as an obstetrician, a student of music, a foreign language, of clinical epidemiology, and of poetry. The last three groups include poems describing journeys, too, but those did not require physical transfer from one place to another. These were journeys taken by the mind, a mental movement. The author mostly writes in free verse and this collection is confined to free verse for the author's attraction to the spontaneity, impulse and element of surprise th