The Year of The Apparitions

The objectives of this book, The Year of the Apparitions, can be summed up in one word, survival. The survival game is hard for everyone. In my case, the stories that poetry and theatre can tell are life-vests fitting me amazingly well, painting was another one for a while. Stories not only help us to stay afloat, a good story is still the most powerful engine in the world, as it has been in the last few thousand years. My poems are short stories, open to interpretation, a little bit provocative, full of images. In this book I think I have managed to make my stories more solid. I believe that they are told in a way comprehensible to people from many backgrounds. We are all survivors.

José Manuel Sevilla was born in 1959 and has been publishing poetry since 1991. He has lived happily in Hong Kong since 2003 and has participated actively in artistic life. His photograph series, “Street Language”, was first exhibited at the Fringe Club in Ice House Street. He wrote poems for the ballet “Sombras, Sol y Flamenco”, staged at the Sheung Wan Civic Centre in 2012. His play, “The Bridge” was performed at the McAuley Theatre, Hong Kong Arts Centre in 2011; another, “Kennedy” was performed in the same Theatre, in 2016. In 2012, his poem, ‘Sonia Wants to Rent an Apartment’, was awarded first prize in the Cha Encountering Poetry Contest, Asian Cha magazine. He was included in the poetry anthologies Mingled Voices 2 and Mingled Voices 3, published in 2018 and 2019 respectively by Proverse Hong Kong.

With this collection, Hong Kong finally has its first magic realist. These dream-nuanced pieces splatter our senses with a veritable chiaroscuro of fanciful images....The Orient and Catalonia merge seamlessly in one kaleidoscopic poetic imbroglio!

 

—Vaughan Rapatahana, PhD, Poet, literary critic, essayist and novelist, winner of the inaugural Proverse Poetry Prize

 

Betrayal and survival are two clues ... to this poetry, which expresses personal dreams, yet knows these are conditioned by the forms politics take, which produce both of them.

 

—Jeremy Tambling, PhD, teaches as Professor of English at SWAP University Warsaw, and used to be Professor of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong, and Professor of Literature at Manchester before retiring.

 

“Unwilling to be fooled by ideologies yet recognizing that those same ideologies form an inescapable trap for the human subject, the poet's subjective voice seems to reflect a fundamental desire for transgression, yet shows at the same time the maddening impossibility of transgression as long as it is imprisoned within language and culture.”

 

—Ahmed Elbeshlawy, PhD, independent scholar of Comparative Literature

 

Rather than using fancy words to praise The Year of the Apparitions, one may simply measure its truth as literature: if a collection of poems can deliver its art of irony and resonance to one’s emotional memory, it is more than a successful work.

 

—Yang Yee Shan