Rofel G. Brion. Kapag Natagpuan Kita / Once I Find You. With a Foreword by Noelle Q. de Jesus. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2013. 121 pages.

• Main Author: Manalo, Paolo
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2014
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/paha/vol4/iss2/9; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/paha/article/1125/viewcontent/PAHA_204.2_209_20Book_20reviews_20__20Manalo.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Excerpt: Those familiar with Rofel G. Brion’s poetry will recognize in Kapag Natagpuan Kita, the spare language maintained in compact open forms that he has developed in four previous poetry collections. His subjects are still drawn from memory, nature, and observations of the ordinary. With the exception of a few poems, Brion’s speaker retains sobriety and earnestness in finding wonder in the everyday. Sometimes the speaker is an observer, quite perceptive of subtle changes as only one capable of stillness and of finding stillness in his surroundings can be. He encounters these changes through images in the present or retrieves them from a past that is still within reach. As Mesandel Virtusio Arguelles notes in a review of Brion’s previous collection Sandali: Mga Pili at Bagong Tula (2006), memories and images are the two main subjects of Brion’s poetry, but his methods are not simple recollection or illustration.