Summary
Alaric Cabiling’s lyrical language invites us into a well of experience that reaches deep into love, desire, and sorrow and which explores a vast inner world. This collection of poems is a journey through a penetrating darkness, but in the end, we come to know, and welcome, the light.
About the Author
The Darkest Day is Cabiling’s debut collection of poetry. Currently pursuing a degree in information systems, with a concentration in web development, he has varied interests in art, photography, and music and is fluent in two languages. A native of the Republic of the Philippines, he is currently living and writing in Richmond, Virginia.
Reviews
Praenomen Press has just released its first collection of poetry from Alaric Cabiling, a promising new writer. The works collected together in The Darkest Day are somber, dark, and sweet in the vein of Sylvia Plath, Keats, or Shelley, and reveal a poet who unflinchingly looks into the depths of depression and finds beauty.
The poems in The Darkest Day are told from an outsider’s perspective. Each one has its own elegiac tone, dealing with loneliness, lost innocence, and sad sentimentality. A sweet melancholy pervades much of the work, but the sadness in these poems never becomes overwhelming. Rather, the compassion behind the author’s free verse arouses the reader’s sympathies.
Alaric Cabiling has suffered from a long battle with depression, and this comes across clearly in the work. He has said that his writing is a sort of therapy for him, and that it is his hope that The Darkest Day will reach other individuals who are themselves struggling with depression. Cabiling’s book has the capacity to do a lot of good by showing victims of depression that they are not alone. But this is not to say that his audience is limited—far from it. The Darkest Day is a collection of sweet and sad poems, and is just the thing for a rainy day.
– Stone Ferrell, Brandylane Publishers
