Enrique S. Villasis is a poet and a scriptwriter.
His first book of poems, Agua, contains poems that won the 2011, 2012, and 2014 Don Carlos Palanca Awards and the 2011 Maningning Miclat Poetry Competition. It was a finalist for the National Book Awards. He is currently working on his second collection of poems that are based on Vicente S. Manansala’s paintings.
His poems were translated into Czech and English and were published in Plav, Words Without Borders, Lunch Ticket, Exchanges: Journals of Literary Translations. His poem, “Birds in Flight, 1965” translated by Bernard Capinpin was one of the winners of WWB’s Poems in Translation Contest. A suite of his poems “Buwaya” was translated by Scott Chua and won the 2019 Gabo Prize from Lunch Ticket.
Citing the poet David Tomas Martinez: ““‘Birds In Flight, 1965’ enters readers in a moment of time that emblemizes a natural phenomenon, that of birds flying together, as metaphor for not exactly transcendence (it’s more disseminated than an epiphanic acme), but as the Post-Modern expression of cohesive simultaneity. Meaning, the speaker experiences via the birds flying separately yet concordantly an immanence and a transcendence, a growth and a regression, a lightness and a density, an innocence and a wisdom. This aspect of the poem is quite Blakean, in its truest sense of camaraderie, as in Yin-Yang, not focusing on differences but on intersectionality, which is so beautifully expressed through the chick nesting in a translucent eggshell or the sole (soul’s) curtsy to the mimosa.”
The poet Michael Bazzett has this something to say about the suite of poems “Buwaya” (Crocodile): “I was immediately taken and transported by these poems, by the pungent images, by the “weathered skull of a crocodile, the hollows of its / Eyes like a nest of fireflies.” The crocodile is refracted here, as both vision and reality, through the eyes of the vagrant, the monk, the city dweller. Villasis evokes these personas in voices that are utterly distinct, each with its own cadences and momentum, yet they are united in their contemplation of what lives in the rustling night, of the darkness that resides both without and within.”
“In translator Scott Chua’s reading, the power of Enrique Villasis’s work arises from “the restraint with which he conveys a very tropical kind of restlessness: a windless, humid kind of disquiet,” and Chua’s translation employs a steady music and propulsive enjambment to capture this unsettling vitality. These poems sing with clarity even as they leave me hungry for more; this is indeed work to make a reader “believe in life again.”
His works for ABS-CBN includes the popular TV shows Guns and Roses, E-boy, Bridges of Love, Dolce Amore, and Bagani. Bridges of Love was nominated for best telenovela in the 44th International Emmy Award. His script for the horror film Kaluskos is an official entry for 2020 Cinemalaya Film Festival.
Enrique S. Villasis 