Edith L. Tiempo was born on April 22, 1919 in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya. She is a poet, fiction writer, teacher and literary critic. Edith is one of the finest Filipino writers who writes her works in English language. Her works are characterized by a remarkable fusion of style and substance, of craftsmanship and insight. Her poems are intricate verbal transfigurations of significant experiences as revealed, in two of her much anthologized pieces, "The Little Marmoset" and "Bonsai". As fictionist, Tiempo is as morally profound. Her language has been marked as "descriptive but unburdened by scrupulous detailing." She is an influential tradition in Philippine literature in English. Together with her late husband, Edilberto K. Tiempo, she founded and directed the Silliman National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City, which has produced some of the country's best writers.
Published works:
A. Novels
- A Blade of Fern (1978)
- His Native Coast (1979)
- The Alien Corn (1992)
- One, Tilting Leaves (1995)
- The Builder (2004)
- The Jumong (2006)
- Short Story Collections
- Abide, Joshua, and Other Stories (1964)
B. Poetry
- The Tracks of Babylon and Other Poems (1966)
- The Charmer's Box (1993)
- Beyond, Extensions (1993)
- Marginal Annotations and Other Poems (2001)
- Bibliophile
C. Others
- Six Poetry Formats and the Transforming Image: A Monograph on Free Verse (2008)
- A Native Clearing: Filipino Poetry and Verse from English Since the '50s to the Present: Edith L. Tiempo to Cirilo F. Bautista (1993)
- A Passionate Patience: Ten Filipino Poets on the Writing of their Poems (1995)
- An Edith Tiempo Reader (1999)
- Six Filipino Poets (1955)
- Six Uses of Fictional Symbols (2004)
- Marginal Annotations and Other Poems (2001)
Bonsai
Edit L.
Tiempo
All that I love
I fold over once
And once again
And keep in a box
Or a slit in a hollow
post
Or in my shoe.
All that I love?
Why, yes, but for the
moment-
And for all time, both.
Something that folds and
keeps easy,
Son's note or Dad's one
gaudy tie,
A roto picture of a
queen,
A blue Indian shawl, even
A money bill.
It's utter sublimation,
A feat, this heart's
control
Moment to moment
To scale all love down
To a cupped hand's size
Till seashells are broken
pieces
From God's own bright
teeth,
And life and love are
real
Things you can run and
Breathless hand over
To the merest child.
My Interpretation for the Bonsai Poem:
Bonsai is a special type of plant wherein you have to limit
its growth by constantly cutting or trimming. Just like love when it is too
much you have to control it because too much will not do any good. Bonsai
plants will not live forever, in the long run it will die or fade away. Just
like love it doesn’t always last forever and as time passes it will fade away
or it diminishes.
It seems like the writer keeps all her loved ones in her heart,
like she hold them really tight and takes good care of them. For me it seems
like she’s holding them too tight up to the point that she doesn’t even let
them do what they want. She began the second stanza with a question it seems
like she’s trying to defend herself for keeping all her love in her own hands
and taking good care of them like the things she has mentioned. In the third stanza
it seems like she’s shrinking or making her love less or more like she’s
controlling her love for her loved ones. In the fourth stanza it seems like the
love she has taken good care of has been broken. I think she believes that you cannot
control love. You shouldn’t hold someone so tight and you should give them
space and freedom because if you hold them too tight there will be a tendency
it will break just like what happened to the seashell, shattered in to pieces. And
it will hurt you so much.