Description:
From "Beyond Autobiography" by Bienvenido Lumbera:
Brothers introduced readers in the young poet’s time to poem which, in the late years of the 1950s, dared to be (against the fashion of the times) political poetry. The poems were an attempt to break away from the aestheticist concerns of his contemporaries, but the poet had found it difficult at that stage to forge a style demanded by his subject matter and intentions. There simply were no models in the local tradition of Philippine writing in English he could go back to, except such discredited or unfashionable poets like R. Zulueta da Costa ("Like the Molave"), Aurelio Alvero ("1896"), or, at best, the expatriate Carlos Bulosan ("If You Want to Know What We Are").... In 1971, Sison repudiated, "with the exception of five or six," his poems in Brothers. The occasion was the first national congress of PAKSA, a progressive writers organization. In a message, he made an act of self-criticism, saying that "the bulk of the poems, cannot pass the test of proletarian revolutionary criticism." He expressed the hope that "with this repudiation I shall be able to write better poems."
First Year of Publication: 1961
Publisher: Manila: Filipino Signatures
Contributing Authors: Petronilo Bn. Daroy (Introduction)
Extent: 26 p.
