AGIMAT: ?Spellbinding? ? Guardian

this charms the buried light of stars – this deflects bullets – this unblooms a war –

In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an agimat, an amulet or charm, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. In a world of daily pain and loss, Romalyn Ante’s second collection asks how do we keep safe what we hold most dear? At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet – a practicing nurse in the NHS – is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19, and finds herself questioning what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal.
V Past conflicts swim into the now: when the poet falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family’s suffering under Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible, many-breasted goddess Mebuyan, the poet’s alter ego. In Philippine myth, Mebuyan nurses the spirits of departed children in the underworld, but here she watches over young people in crisis – a girl who can’t stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct. These are poems of strength and solace – they quiver with heart, feeling a way toward hope.

Romalyn Ante FRSL is a Filipino-British poet, essayist, and editor. She was born in Lipa, Philippines, and was 16 years old when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to live in the UK. Her debut poetry collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, was shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2020, and her second collection, AGIMAT, published in 2024. She lives in the West Midlands where until recently she worked as a full-time NHS nurse and psychotherapist, specialising in the mental healthcare of young people.