Drivers at the Short-time Motel / Eugene Gloria

"After we make love, I teach you/ words I'm slowly forgetting,/ names for hands, breast, hair, and river." Language is not all that slips away, and in his first collection Gloria is intent on maintaining his hold on things Filipino while simultaneously absorbing all that speaks of America. Gloria is concerned with self-definition, with feelings of exile and homelessness--hardly unusual for someone torn between two cultures. Of course, it is never that easy: War and rumors of war are ever in the offing. Vietnam left him to "sleepwalk amid the ruins." In one poem, a speaker who cannot save everyone in Southeast Asia is called on again after a street accident. "I imagine the Lord Jesus descending from his cross,/ a good marine saving the dead in Limbo./ But on this god-forgotten street a crowd gathers,/ crows peck and gawk, and name me `Joe.' " Gloria's poems are complex and exciting, accessible yet layered.