The poems in Karlo Sevilla’s Recumbent can seem an arbitrary selection without a particular theme. Here we can find vignettes of family life, dreamlike sequences, vivid images of street violence and political murder, even fully surreal poems and surreal images secreted in others. A surface reading cannot adequately reveal a consistent theme which may run through these poems. There’s something else going on here, a barely hidden backdrop to the tales Sevilla brings to the table. The poet suggests a deeper and darker theme when he writes “I’m here fallen / where even shadows / dare not fall.”This collection of poems is an illusion, a trick of the eye and the heart by a clever magician. At surface, the poems here may appear to tell simple tales of home life and family, uncomplicated slices of the poet’s personal life. But something else is here, just below the surface. Karlo Sevilla hints at this subtext in his epigraph, a self-written type of subtitle: these are, he says, “poems about and from the body laid or lying on any surface–steady or unsteady, dead or alive.” This theme is repeated and enhanced in poems throughout this collection. Sevilla’s poems are less about the hard-copy world we inhabit than a sense of the absolute Silence through which we all move from birth to death. In a poem describing a man tortured and dying, the poet writes that the man “ never squealed; / not another’s whereabouts compromised / nor a single real name revealed.” In his poetry, Karlo Sevilla walks a thin line between our mundane lives and another, darker place where, his narrator says, “it’s the light that makes the shadows” but his young daughter “shakes her head, ‘It’s the dark.’” It’s along this subtle line that we will see the magic in Sevilla’s poetry. In the world Karlo Sevilla describes in his poems, each of our lives includes a place of shadows where our secrets hide in the Silence.
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