Poems for the young LODESTAR By Danton Remoto (The Philippine Star) Updated April 04, 2010 12:00 AM Sunday In Dust Devils, National Artist for Literature Rio Alma (a.k.a. Virgilio Almario) gathers together his bilingual poems on youth. Some of them have seen print in earlier books published in the last 30 years. But the poems still speak to us, as fresh as when they were newly minted. The book is edited and translated into English by Marne Kilates, one of the country’s best wordsmiths. A sense of country is what the book imparts, and it does so without a heavy hand, or a sledgehammer pounding into your head. As Kilates notes in his introduction, this book is “especially for young people who perhaps have never felt how it is to be apart or uprooted from one’s native soil, or especially for those who have. Rio Alma seems to say in his poems: that this is how it is to love and remember our country, this place of our youth, which we cannot forgo or forget, because there is no other. “For t...