Even while wearing his many hats as educator, activist, editor, journalist, university professor and cultural administrator, (Virgilio S. Almario in his role as critic and literary historian) has always been a poet and a traveler. The poems in this collection are culled from his last ten poetry books that individually and invariably include a poem or a group of poems on places where the poet has traveled.

Among these poems, too, might be felt most the characteristic tension between home and destination, the past and the present, and the febrile twilight in-between where the poet-traveler finds himself, whether it is in Vigan or Davao, Sta. Fe or at the foot of Mayon, or away from home shores in Sofia, Sounion, or Stonehenge.

And because Rio Alma is Rio Alma, the persona in these poems of wandering, sometimes of displacement and alienation, is always Filipino. It is this Filipino-ness, which governs all his poetry and resides naturally in the original, that the translator must, with any merit at all, transpose, “trans-relate” into this sometimes cumbersome, sometimes wanting, second language of ours.

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