The realities of life and elected priorities dictated,
in my case, the slimness of this collection. Somehow
I feel an archival 1908 Police Gazette reportage
of a woman returning home from the market "with her
small basket of poverty" analogous to the meager
contents of this collection.

The early poems included in the collection measure
but a third of what I have discarded. The section written
in the immediate postwar years assembled under the
section "Thunder in the Tongue" does not include two
long poems which originally appeared in the Manila
Evening News Saturday Magazine and the Philippine
Collegian. The section "A Stun of Jewels" remains
intact except for a couple of revisions in the poems
"The Heart" and "The Trees."

Additionally, the poems in this volume appeared in
several anthologies and literary supplements in the
Philippines, and in The Literary Review (Farleigh
Dickenson University, New Jersey); New Writing From
the Philippines; A Critique and Anthology (Syracuce
University); PEN Anthology of Poetry; Dallas Morning
News (Texas); New York Herald-Tribune; and Los
Angeles Women's Magazine. Four Poems have been
translated into German and eight have Russian
translations.

There was a hiatus of twenty years when I did not
write poetry due to pressures of a career which
involved foreign correspondence work and public
relations. The raising of a family of four girls and
three boys could have been another factor but for
the love and devotion of my supportive wife who took
the burden thereof and eased me into to the corporate
world so that we all can survive.

The last section of the collection, "Balance of Our
Days," brackets the years of a new life in the United
States where the family, one after another, migrated in
a collective search for the further pursuit of happiness
and peace. It includes poems salvaged from earlier
years and revised; both versions being included here.
Another one, chronologically, belongs to an earlier
period of my writing. Somehow, its inclusion in this
section reflects an urgency to reiterate the ethnic
origin of my being which had begun to manifest itself
in these later years of my life, in this new land.

--Carlos A. Angeles