Harold Legaspi is a poet writing in Darug land. His first book, Letters in Language, was the runner-up in the inaugural Puncher & Wattmann Prize for a First Book of Poetry, was published 2021 in the Flying Islands Pocket Books of Poetry series with Cerberus Press and Association of Stories in Macau.
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Letters in Language
Letters in Language re-iterates what is possible in the prose poem and autography, and is intended to evoke cultural memory. The Tagalog (Filipino) mirroring the English translations are intended to provoke monolingual speakers to question, as it conveys Harold Legaspi’s identity, being bi-lingual, in a manner of speaking, to tell his story in a language he almost forgot through the migration process into Australia. By conveying meaning in two languages, his writing functions in the most concrete way, through exemplifying not abandoning the language that raised him in a land now foreign to him.