Cirilo F. Bautista: His Works:

About

Cirilo F. Bautista is a Filipino critic, poet and writer. Recognized for his works that had earned him literary awards for his excellence in the field of literature. Furthermore, he is a co- founding member of the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC). Cirilo studied at University of Sto. Tomas where he got his degree in AB Literature and became a magna cum laude in 1963. He also took MA Literature at St. Louis University in Baguio where he again became a magna cum laude and Doctor of Arts in Language and Literature at De La Salle University. ( De La Salle University website)

After studying, Cirilo entered the field of education which made him into a professor. Became a professor at Waseda University in Japan and Ohio University in US. He has also taught poetry and creative writing at De La Salle University. (Filling Station website)

His Works

This book brings together some 115 essays from Bautista's weekly column, "Breaking Signs," which has been appearing in the Philippine Panorama, Sunday magazine of Manila Bulletin, for 17 years now. The subject is the interlink between life and literature, how one provokes the other for an interesting and fruitful dialogue. How far is life reflected in literature, and literature in life? Bautista speculates on books, people, events, and institutions, looking even for the most tenuous of answers, to bring us little reports with enjoyable freshness and insight. He studies human action with the view of explaining their irony or peculiarity, as in Mike Tyson biting off Evander Holyfield's ears in their boxing match in 1997; the grandeur of Kublai Khan; the commercialization of Christmas; the kindness of strangers; and the art of piano repair. He shows us how life refracts poetry and fiction and makes them significant concerns even in a society not known for literary patronage.

An author of several books of poetry, fiction, criticism and translation, Bautista proves in The House of True Desire that he can also handle the genre of short composition with expertise and style

This festschrift in honor of poet Cirilo F. Bautista was first conceived more than two years ago by the late Br. Andrew Gonzalez, FSC, who envisioned the book to be the best way of honoring one of the great pillars of the literary tradition of De La Salle University as well as of the Philippines. "Believe and Betray: New and Collected Poems" is composed of four collections of Bautista's lyric poems from the early '60s to 2005, spanning more than 50 years of writing.

he Trilogy of Saint Lazarus, consisting of The Archipelago, Telex Moon, and Sunlight on Broken Stones, and hailed by local and international critics as the greatest modern epic poetry in the English language confirms Bautista's position as the foremost Filipino poet today

In the past few years, many young poets have enlivened our literature with their fresh voices and unique interpretation of the human condition. Mostly products of the various writing workshops in the country, they respond to social and personal realities with exciting and well-informed facility. Their reflections vibrate with a taut understanding of common virtues and falsities, with deft handling of poetic surfaces and undertows.

The third part of Bautista’s magnum opus The Trilogy of Saint Lazurus. In this culminating work, the Bard of De La Salle University traces the positive future of the Filipino people, as guided by the lessons of the Revolution. This epic consists of 3,100 lines of verse arranged into 5-line stanzas. Awarded the first prize in the epic category of the National Centennial Commission in August 1998.

A Native Clearing is the sequel to Man of Earth (1989). It covers Filipino poetry wrought from English since the 1950s to the present. Because there are many more poets over that period, Prof. Abad decided to include only those who were born between 1919 and 1941, i.e., those who, from Edith L. Tiempo to Cirilo F. Bautista, worked and remolded English to the Filipino sense of his own reality. A few older poets from Man of Earth provide continuity in the poetic tradition.

Bautista delivers thirty-six discourses on poetry and meaning. The author mines diverse sources such as Hannah Arendt, Gemino Abad, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Lionel Trilling, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teo Antonio, and Liu Hsieh to deliver concise meditations on everything from “lantay na ginto,” the essence of Filipino poetry, Conrado Balweg, to the tyranny of the caesura.

The second volume in Cirilo F. Bautista's epic The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus won first prize in English poetry in the 1975 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Telex Moon continues from the execution of Rizal in the first volume and uses the "Intelligence of Rizal" as the reader's perspective, thus shifting through space and time and presenting otherwise-missed details in the history of the Filipino soul.