The Long Attention: Ann van Wijgerden Finds Poetry Between Tondo and the Forest
Updated: Aug 17
For nearly two decades, Ann van Wijgerden has walked the narrow streets of Tondo, listened to children dream beyond poverty, and found restoration among the forests of Antipolo. Her debut poetry collection, Dear Planet, did not begin as a book. It emerged over forty years of writing—and from a lifetime spent learning that witnessing is not enough unless it is accompanied by love.
Words by Mye Mulingtapang
Photos courtesy of Ann van Wijgerden
The Poems That Waited
The first poems Ann van Wijgerden wrote were never meant to become a book.
She wasn't thinking about publishers or literary careers. There was no outline tucked away in a drawer, no ambition to assemble a collection. She was simply a girl discovering that some emotions were easier to carry once they became words.
Poetry became the place where she took everything that resisted explanation.
She describes it as her "therapy partner," a phrase that carries a quiet honesty rather than literary flourish. She has been writing, she says, "from falling in love for the first time, up to the present day of trying to make sense(!) of old age." Across four decades, poetry remained a constant companion, accompanying first love and homesickness, marriage and migration, grief and ageing. Whenever life became too tangled to understand directly, she returned to the page. The poems rarely offered answers, but they created space where uncertainty could exist without demanding immediate resolution.
For much of that time, those poems lived quietly.
Some eventually found homes in literary magazines across Britain, Canada, Australia, and the United States. Many more remained where they had always been—in notebooks, folders, and forgotten computer files. Each belonged to a particular moment, capturing a feeling before life moved on. None was written with the next poem in mind.
Then, sometime around 2023, she began reading them together.
What surprised her was not that the poems shared similar themes, but that they seemed to be continuing a conversation she hadn't realized she had been having for decades. Images resurfaced years later without intention. Questions she believed she had left behind returned in different forms. Read one after another, the poems no longer felt like separate pieces. They felt connected, each completing something the previous one had begun.
"It was as though they were children," she says, "who needed to find a home together."
That home became Dear Planet.
Although the collection gathers poems written between 2016 and early 2025, the emotional landscape stretches much further back. The poems reflect what she describes as years of "wrestling repeatedly through culture shock (and reverse culture shock), the loss of loved ones, discovering the joy of kinship with nature, coming to terms with sickness, old(er) age and uncertainty." They also bear witness to experiences beyond her own private life, including the injustice she observed while living in the Philippines during the early years of the Drug War.
Looking back, Dear Planet feels less like a project she consciously set out to write than the natural outcome of decades spent paying close attention—to language, to memory, and eventually to the lives of people who quietly transformed the way she understood both.
How Ann van Wijgerden's Life Across Three Countries Shaped Her Poetry
Van Wijgerden often remarks that she has spent roughly a third of her life in England, a third in the Netherlands, and a third in the Philippines. It is an observation she offers almost casually, yet it reveals the geography of her imagination as much as the geography of her life.
England was where she first fell in love with language.
Not simply with reading or writing, but with the texture of words themselves. Poetry arrived naturally because it could hold contradictions that ordinary conversation often could not. As a young girl, she wrote about first love. As the years passed, poems became the place where she reflected on loss, uncertainty, and the quiet questions that accompany adulthood. The rhythms of language gradually became inseparable from the rhythms of thought.
The Netherlands broadened that relationship in unexpected ways.
Learning Dutch meant entering another culture and another way of approaching ideas. She found herself in conversations that valued directness and honesty, where difficult questions were welcomed rather than avoided. It was also there that she met Paul, the man she would eventually marry. She recalls that chapter with characteristic humour, laughing that she "picked up a Dutch husband along the way," before returning to the insight that has stayed with her ever since.
Every language, she says, possesses its own beauty and its own music. Moving between English and Dutch taught her that translation is never simply the exchange of vocabulary. Every language rearranges reality in subtle ways, shaping not only what people say but how they think, remember, and understand one another.
The deepest transformation, however, came after she arrived in the Philippines.
"It’s where I learned to look beyond the circumstances to truly see the people."
She offers the observation almost in passing, yet it quietly challenges the instinct many outsiders bring with them. Visitors notice circumstances first. They see crowded neighbourhoods, makeshift homes, rivers carrying plastic and refuse, and the unmistakable signs of poverty. Those realities are impossible to ignore, but they are only the beginning of the story.
People reveal themselves more slowly.
First come the names, then the stories behind them. Visits become friendships. A family insists you stay for lunch despite having very little to offer. A child proudly places a drawing in your hands. Birthdays are celebrated together, and eventually there are funerals to mourn as well. Gradually, almost without realizing it, your attention begins to shift. The circumstances remain unchanged, but the people can no longer be defined by them.
That shift transformed not only how Van Wijgerden saw the Philippines but also how she understood herself.
"It’s where I’ve found more freedom and acceptance to be myself," she says.
Then, with the gentle humour that runs through much of her conversation, she adds that she can now insist, despite her unmistakable British accent, "'Pinoy ang puso ko!' without being ridiculed."
When she and Paul first arrived, they believed they had come to help. Looking back, she speaks less about what they contributed than about what the country and its people gave them in return. The gift was not something tangible but a different understanding of community, dignity, and what it means to live alongside others. That understanding emerged gradually through countless encounters that seemed ordinary at the time but became transformative in retrospect.
The poems changed alongside her.
The earliest ones often looked inward, exploring private emotions and personal experience. Over time, however, another world entered the work. Reflections on grief began sharing space with questions of justice. Nature appeared alongside memory. Individual experience widened into collective experience, not because she consciously changed direction, but because her own life had expanded beyond herself.
Many of the poems were written during years that profoundly shaped contemporary Philippine history, including the beginning of the Drug War in 2016. Those events were never subjects she deliberately selected for poetry. They had already become part of the emotional landscape in which she and the people around her were living. The poems absorbed those realities because life itself had already done so.
DearPlanet feels less like a book she decided to write than one she gradually discovered.
"The three countries have shaped me utterly," she reflects. "They have shaped me utterly, in my ways of thinking and of appreciating how wonderfully diverse we fellow humans can be; deeply different yet sharing a profound kinship."
That sense of kinship became the quiet foundation beneath Dear Planet. Long before it became a collection about nature, hope, or social justice, it was the record of a writer learning that attention is its own form of love. Writing begins long before words appear on a page. It begins by remaining present long enough for people, places, and landscapes to reveal themselves.
The lesson would follow Van Wijgerden into Tondo, where narrow bridges crossed polluted rivers, children hurried to school with worn backpacks slung over their shoulders, and poetry gradually learned to look outward as much as inward. There, amid the ordinary rhythms of community life, she would discover that hope often arrives quietly, asking only that someone remain long enough to recognize it.
Editor's Note
This feature is presented in three parts to preserve the depth and narrative arc of Ann van Wijgerden's remarkable journey. Rather than condensing decades of reflection into a single article, this series follows the path that shaped Dear Planet—from a lifetime of writing and the communities of Tondo to the ethical questions of witness, belonging, and the natural world. We invite readers to experience the story as it unfolded: one chapter at a time.
Part I: The Poems That Waited
Part II: Where the Bridge Crosses the River
Part III: Becoming Part of the Story
Support the Dear Planet Project
Dear Planet is more than a collection of poetry—it is also an opportunity to give back. By purchasing a copy through the Dear Planet Project, readers can support the work of Young Focus, helping provide educational opportunities and support for children and young people living in underserved communities in the Philippines.
Buy the book. Read the poetry. Help create opportunities for children.
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