Alfonso P. Santos — A Garland of Sampaguitas

Alfonso P. Santos wrote A Garland of Sampaguitas while studying in Los Angeles, but its imaginative center lies across the Pacific in San Antonio, Zambales. Flowers, winds, birds, moonlight, and remembered streets become a language of distance: the poems speak from California toward a Philippine home that remains sensuously present and physically unreachable. Traditional meters and rhymes carry homesickness, friendship, study, romance, autumn, animals, fraternity life, and the uneasy promise of American education. Santos called the fragrance of sampaguita poetry’s mixture of youth, sorrow, love, and suggestion, and that mixture gives the volume its changing tones—from playful observation to what one contemporary reviewer called “sad yearning.” This edition restores the complete 1936 collection and two later newspaper poems, recovering a Filipino student’s Los Angeles book as a moving document of migration, memory, and divided belonging.