Kasiguroan (o hi W.K. Heisenberg[1] Nagwinaray)

tionan-o ta masisiguro

an mga butang

^

kun bisan an pulong

nga “siguro”+–

an termino para han kasiguroan

ha Winaray–

^

diri liwat sigurado?

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Waray Natext Ngadto han Magsiriday

batona gad

itext gad

^

bisan ano

ikakalipay ko

^

itext gad

batona gad

^

bisan la buyayaw.

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Alagad daw… (or why I envy Voltaire Oyzon)

Book review by Daryll Jane S. Delgado

An Maupay ha mga Waray ug iba pa nga mga siday

Voltaire Q. Oyzon

NCCA and UPV Tacloban Creative Writing
Program

Manila, 2008; 59 pp

***

I envy Voltaire Oyzon. I
think I am more than a little jealous of him. He knows of what he writes, he
owns the tool which he uses to write, his imagination knows no bounds, no
hesitation, no fear.

Astig hi Voltaire. Diri ko ma-imagine kun gin ano niya pagbug-os hini nga mga
siday, ngan maaram ako nga diri la ini asya it iya kaya suraton. No wonder,
waray magruha-duha pag-translate para ha iya an makarit nga hi Merlie Alunan,
ngan an iba pa nga up-and-coming writers, Janis Salvacion, Anna Laurice Jo,
ngan Harvey Fiji, ngan an iba pa nga binmulig hini nga project.

Kamakauurit ni Voltaire. Kakakarit ni Voltaire. Grabe it imagination ni
Voltaire. Grabe kay tungod nga kontrolado, pero malabad.

What I mean to say is, the imagination that the poems display in this
collection is grounded in the only way that poems should be grounded: they create
in the reader a secure and yet disconcerting feeling of being in touch with the
a strange and yet knowable reality and with very personal sentiments. And, as a
reader, you cannot help but feel very honored and privileged to be granted
access to this writer’s reality and feelings, because the reality, rather, the
realities that he offers, are rarely seen in Philippine poetry, perhaps because
most of us cannot bear or afford to take stock of some of these realitie.
Voltaire, on the other hand, stares at them, and engages in them, with eyes
wide open, and with heart aflame. The realities that he offers are painful and
beautiful. These are the realities of love and war, of globalization and
ancient history, of poverty and natural wealth, of friendships and deaths. To
say that what is most admirable about this collection is the emotional potency
as well as the vulnerability of the poems, is to say that we are in the
presence of a writer whose maturity is well beyond his years.

Umayon ako han tanan nga mga siday dinhi hini nga collection. Pero may mga
special favorites ako. An akon mga paborito an mga siday nga may “conceit”,
“wit”, “humor” ngan “irony”, an mga napabuyayaw, napa-tawa, napaurit, ngan
napa-uga. May mga siday dinhi nga an trajectory han ira conciseness na-remind
ha akon han mga metaphysical poets. May ada liwat mga poems nga napakalas an
pagka postmodern nga iba nga klase, baga hin post-postmodern— mas matarom, mas
“ironic”.

Gusto ko igtampalo ha mga napaka-postmodern na mga Filipino writers an iya “An
Talipsay han Gugma” (“The Love Curve”), gusto ko iparayaw ha akon mga kilala
nga writers na aktibista, ngan mga post-colonial nga kritiko, an iya simple,
pero halarom ngan mapait nga “Didto ha Amon”, “Tawgi” ngan “Hi Salvador
Magsusundalo” (

Salvador

will enter the Army”). May mga paborito ako, sugad han “Kan Toytoy pag-asoy han
agsob nga karantahay ha ira balay”, nga diri ko gusto i-analyze hin duro, kay
nadiri ako nga maruba. Instinctive it iya ginhuhugot nga response. Pa-uga ba.
Siyempre, an title poem nga “An Maupay ha Mga Waray”, pa-uga liwat. Simple,
bug-os hin duro, pero amo gihap, may trajectory nga napa-expand hit iya karuyag
signgon, it iya meaningfulness diri contained.

Of course, if you do not speak or read Waray, some of the crispness, and the
humor and irony, inherent in the sound of the original language are sometimes
lost. But the translations are more than competent. In most cases, the
translated versions stand on their own. The mere fact that Merlie Alunan did
the translations for many of the poems here should be another big reason to get
this book.

Pero an

usa

nga butang nga akon gud naayunan hini nga mga siday: an iya pulitika. The poems
deal with such a wide range of subjects and emotions; they are carried by the
various and varying voices of their speakers, but the politics of the entire
collection is very stable, very clear. I will not name it. It is not for me to
name it. It is enough for me that I see it. And I know you will too, and it
will change you, when you read this book.

Nakaghuna-huna gud ako hin maupay kahuman ko pagbasa hini nga collection.
Feeling ko bumaltok ako. Feeling ko may naabre nga gutiay nga bintana ha
kalibutan, gutiay pero multifaceted, ngan importante hin duro, it “view” nga
iya ginpapakita.

Alagad daw ano hi Voltaire. Kasumo. Kalabad. Kakarit.

 

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CCP

Matutulala ka sa matipid na haraya ni Oyzon.

-Hermino Beltran

Cultural Center of the Philippines

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Waray Beauty

Book review by Efmer Agustin

            Waray literature has a big reason to celebrate, that is with the coming of Voltaire Q. Oyzon’s collection of poetry in the language bearing the proud label of An Maupay ha mga Waray. But this latest addition to the local literature is not just a mere collection for its own sake, but something Waraynons should be festive about. In the book’s prologue by the award-winning poet Merlie M. Alunan, the sad reality of the relegation of Waray literature is given focus. Truly, writing and poetry in the local language has been fading through the years and which not many care for, a fact clearly stated in one of the poems in the collection, Nakausa.

            With the publication of Oyzon’s book, with his poems previously published in some other print media and long-been commended, the waning Waray tradition in siday-making seems to have slowed down from being totally mere history. Over he years when literature in the country has been dominated by the English and Tagalog languages, another thing pointed out in some parts in the book, the spirit for writing in the local tongues slowly emerged in places round the country. Waray were of no exception. Oyzon himself has come out from the Viswrite of UPV Tacloban College, a creative workshop that since its conception has helped potential writers in the area improve in the craft.

            An Maupay ha mga Waray indeed contains works of elegance that appears to be shouting to readers that our own language has all the equipment of vibrancy, and that its speakers have just to read the manual to make that vibrancy work. Oyzon, or more intimately, Kuya Volts as we call him, apparently learned that manual by heart and this work of his is here to prove it. He is indeed a kuya when it comes to mastery of Waray and for someone like me who is struggling with some words in the Waray vocabulary (as I unfortunately also am with some foreign languages), Kuya Volts has his poems to help us cope up with such lingual “anemia” (as another acclaimed local writer, Victorio N. Sugbo, ahs precisely diagnosed my college cohorts and I to be severely inflicted with). Yet the poems are not just a show off of the poet’s skillful control of Waray. The grace in the poems is not just because of lexical show off, in fact, some of the siday contain loanwords. More than just displaying almost archaic Waray words, a result of “modernization” to quote Ma’am Alunan’s prologue once again, is the playful use of such terms into meaningful arrays of lines that spell elegance and beauty producing a charming effect on the reader, seeing a lot more beyond the words themselves and getting a glimpse of poetic magic in Waray.

            Going through the book, one would encounter a variety of discourses molded into poems. One would see faces of love, struggle, loss, hope, searching, pain, inquisitiveness, doubt, friendship and relationships, and much more. But as one moves through the pages, poem to poem, a whole story will be seen unfolding. The book is like containing one complete story divided into chapters and each poem is one chapter. The book is like telling the voyage of a person as he sails through life and relates specific experiences that take place in a typical person’s lifetime.

What a better opening to the entire collection (and to the story) than a poem that talks about sunrise as if announcing birth and an anticipation of many more things as the born one grows up. From being begotten, the story then plunges into the whirlwind of occurrences of being human, starting with that story of love, something many would like to hear and that’s with the poem An Gugma wherein love is metaphorically given form. And then many other poems come one after the other, page to page as the story of human life goes on. The story the book relates may however not only be of a person, it can also be the story of a race, a nation, a country. Whichever the story may be attributed to, the complexities of existence still has its downsides; the pain, the struggles, the loss, the grief and maybe, en end to such existence. Certainly, some poems towards the last part of the collection talk about separation and death, a good closure for a narrative that opened up with birth… and a sad one too. However, to whatever does the story in the book talk of, may it be of man’s life, to a wider view as nationhood, or to an overly general and exaggerated perspective as the existence of humanity or of the planet itself, or maybe to a very specific issue as our own specific endeavor for something, everything does not end in separation or death. As the last poem Yana mentions, the search is still to g on, the story will still continue—there is still hope—a beautiful finale to the entire collection that went through the ups and downs. This hope gives us light of the sunrise, which then takes us back to the birth.

Now then, hope is what we see in the Waray literature, for its resurfacing and liveliness. Hope is one of the many maupay sa Waray. With this collection, this hope is going steps higher which may hopefully ultimately transform into reality. An Maupay ha mga Waray should not be and hopefully not just one irregular offshoot of the Waray literary tradition but should rather be a harbinger of something grander, a lead for many more Waray masterpieces in the near future. My hopes are high. God bless An Maupay ha mga Waray. God bless Kuya Volts. God bless Waray writes and poets. God bless the Waray literature.

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Portrait of the Waray as a Verb: Comments on Poems in An Maupay ha mga Waray by Voltaire Oyzon

Book review by Gina Apostol

The gaze I speak from as I read these poems must be my own: a gaze that looks out the window at the hostile peace of mid-spring in a foreign country.  The word, spring, is my enemy: it hosts a world of meaning alien to me.  There is no word for it in my language.  In fact, I am allergic to America’s spring.  I need generic drugs to keep my immune system from derangement—melodramatic sneezing, lurid coughs, a terrible contagion: these are the dastardly yearly effects on me of this alien season, spring.  However, I drug myself with loratidine [brand name claritin], and I’m fine.  Therefore, I am not hacking and convulsing as I read in this poisonous climate a book of poems in my native language: An Maupay ha mga Waray by Voltaire Oyzon.  In fact, the book carries me to a place of remarkable clarity, a different kind of drug.

It is the first book of poems I have ever read in Waray. 

The melancholy paradox of this statement is startling enough.  The fact that a Waray has lived a life without reading poems in her own tongue should make us cough the soul out of our skins—if the fact weren’t possibly true of every Waray we know.  Every day we live this melancholia, that is: an waray upay ha mga Waray, waray-waray la naton an Waray.  A loose translation of this tautological pun: The not-good thing about the Waray is our indifference [waray-waray] to Waray.

One glibly notes that the tautology in the clause describes our existential symptoms.  Waray is both the tongue and the people: so that to ignore one is to lose the other.  The translator’s rendition of a statement in Merlie Alunan’s wonderful preface to Oyzon’s book of poems goes: an kawara han paragsiday ha usa nga pinulongan ug kultura dako nga kawad-an.  I would go further: an kawara han paragsiday ha usa nga pinulongan—kawad-an gayud han kultura.  The disappearance of the poet in a language is the loss of a culture.  It is not so much that the fact that one grows up reading and writing in English or some other language is a toxin: English is no poison, just as spring is no criminal.  Language by any other name can speak a rose, or a sneeze.  But can English really speak barol, bangaw, bulyasan?  Latak, lutak, lagong?  And I don’t just mean the ineluctable modality of the alliteration, to play with this Joycean pretension—since Joyce, I feel, would understand this point.  I mean the untranslatable in the poem “Paglaba,” for instance. 

“Paglaba”

Katima mo gikan          

ginlulungtod ko an at mga bunakan         

ha butnga han binitad nga taklap            

basi igbalotan, dad-on nga’t ha salog      

upod an panay ngan pakang.    

San-o ko pahuroman,   

linain ko an di-kolor      

ngan busag.      

Tima, sabonon. 

Tima, kurukos-on,         

paglambahon han pakang         

an naawil nga mga baho.            

Tima latakan,    

bulyasan.          

Upod han mga buring ug bura   

igin-anos han daganas han Himanglos    

an ak ha im hinumdoman.         

Samtang pinanmamalaypay ko   

an mga busag-busag ko nga bunakan                

nangalimwag an alimyon han im panapton—      

may pag-iliw nga umalop ha akon.         

Pastilan, kun nalalabhan la ini nga dughan          

akon gud ini paglalatakan.         

This wail of pain arising from the quotidian—most distinctively: quotidian speech, as well as quotidian action—is Voltaire Oyzon’s specialty.  The entire poem in English may be called “Laundry,” as Alunan translates it.  “Paglaba,” however, is a verb-cognate: literally, the washing.  The poem describes washing clothes with stark simplicity of language—especially, of verbs. In an almost Homeric evocation (the laundry scene, of course, to people like me is indelibly Joycean-Homeric), Oyzon transforms the everyday into a pang of pain.  Or, as one might pun in English to capture the Waray puns in the poem: the smell of the every day is smelt into one lover’s pain. 

Admittedly, to call it ‘the washing’ is awkward in English.  Herein lies the bane of the translator of the Waray poem: the ‘verbness’ of our world.  In Waray, as perhaps in Tagalog and our other languages, nouns are verb-bound, as if the Waray exists primarily in the catching of itself in action: we are always in medias res, in the perishing flux of our acts.  This may be a cultural paradigm, the metaphorical flightiness of the Waray—and for the translator, in fact, it may well, at times, be a prison, or a blasted blind spot one glosses over.  But for Oyzon, this linguistic premise—our verb-bound world—is what is at stake in his art.  To poach a phrase from the French theorist Jacques Lacan: for Oyzon, as for the Waray, it is the world of verbs that makes the world of things.

Here is a bare-bones translation of the poem: “After you left/I toss our dirty clothes/Into the middle of open sheets/to wrap them up, take them to the river/with basin and paddle./  Before soaking/I sorted colors/from whites./Then I soaped./Then I scrubbed/beat with a paddle/the lingering smell./Then I bleached/and rinsed./  With the grime and the soap suds/down the river of Himanglos/went my memory of you./  As I was hanging out/my white immaculate laundry/the scent of your clothes wafted out—/a pang swept through me./  Pastilan, if I could wash this heart out/I’d bleach it good.”

The crux of this poem: the epicenter of  the ordinary scene’s transubstantiation: is the word memory—’hinumdoman.’  That is, the remembering, or the reflecting, or the thinking of.  The beauty of this poem is that a series of tragicomically ordinary verbs and concrete actions—utterly lovely in their stark homeliness—builds up to the abstract pain of ‘hinumdoman.’  Pahuromon, sabonon, kurukos-on, paglambahon.  Soak, soap, scrub, beat.  To me, in English the verbs lose their carnal duplicity.  Kurukos-on, to my mind, has a murderous scrupulosity: perhaps because of the subtle onomatopeia in the verb, kurukoso, the doubling syllable of which mimics the repetitive act of scrubbing, scrubbing, scrubbing.  Paglambahon, too, loses something in the translation.  The translation would be: then I beat it up.  The fact that the single pungent verb must be translated into English as a clause seems, to me, to miss the beat (yes, I’m Waray; I can’t stop punning).  Plus, the childish aura of childish punishment somehow gets lost (because the word ‘beat’ in English has too many possible meanings [beat eggs, beat as in a race, etc]; whereas in Waray, Oyzon’s petulant ‘paglambahon’ connects correctly, singularly to juvenile distress).  Finally—the verb latak.  If ‘hinumdoman,’ memory, is the poem’s crux, latak is its rivet.  This verb occurs twice in the poem: first, as one of the humdrum serial acts of laundry, the penultimate one, before the climactic bulyas (rinse); second, as the metonymic act of wishful vengeance.  Miraculously, in the syntax, this vengeance is both self- and other-directed: a fascinating psychological knot arising from Waray grammar—in this case, our penchant for the amorphous reflexive.  In both its first and second appearances, latak means bleach.  However, by the poem’s turn, in the third stanza, latak, of course, deconstructs itself.  Oyzon’s fascination with quotidian verbs throughout the poem is gathered up here into a ball of memory: a literal ‘wringing’ of the heart.  Pastilan is right.  (Again, untranslatable.  Alas just does not cut it.  To be honest, all I hear in this word is my Barugon-on mother, resurrected.)  The final cry, akon gud ini paglalatakan, nails the cry of despair: I’d bleach [my heart] good.  It could translate idiomatically into English as: I’d hang this heart out to dry, I’d beat it to death.  This is not a passive pain.  The shadow of the punitive in the verb paglalatakan, which is not quite whispered in the translation bleach, implies a thorough beating out of color—to a pulp, as one might say—and raises the speaker’s pain beyond mere metaphor or sentimentality.  The double meaning has comic fury.  Oyzon’s verbs resist sentiment: they kick and scream with the buoyant life of the Waray in action, in medias res.  The domestic speaker at Himanglos river surely pities himself, but it is a pity with wonderful spite and danger.  Ultimately, the choice of verbs analyzes the situation, and the invincible comedy in paglalatakan transforms heartache—it ‘makes it strange’ and thus real.

The verb latak’s Waray duplicity creates a sophisticated lightness, a sense of comic control.  In many of the poems in An Maupay ha mga Waray, Oyzon’s insistent choice of the fabulously vernacular fashions a lucid, comic perception beyond the heart’s wanton whining.  I kept laughing.  For in these poems, the heart is always speaking: and the heart is a wonderfully funny thing (at least in Waray).  The power of his choice—to be a poet in Waray—is the base of Oyzon’s innovation.  What a stroke of genius—to choose to render in poem our agile, embarrassingly nuanced, profoundly crude and guileful language (for it is, to my mind, our skeptical, duplicitous language that is an maupay ha mga Waray).  Oyzon is not only the only Waray poet I have read: he is an exceptionally supple one.  I enjoyed immensely the ease with which he employed the colloquial noun [bangaw], the precise verb [all the horrors in the masterful poem “Pagbarol”], the surprisingly appropriate combinations of sound.  For instance, the brief “Lubi”:

may mga putot

nauuna kapurak

may iba

mauuga na la

di pa gud matagak

The expulsive consonants have a delightful consonance with the subject of expulsion and retention [the repressed tagak of the coconut, the giddy 'id-dy' putot]: thus, the anal-expulsive-retentive glottals of the funny explosive sounds: purak, uga, tagak.  (True, these glottals abound in the various poems—and who is to speak what that says of the Waray, or the Filipino?)  The excellent humor of “Kawatan ako” is exquisite.  Again, those verbs and verb-nouns in “Lagong”: lupad, hapon, kulaw, tutok, simhot, hamot, laway.  Out of twenty-three words, more than half [12] are verb forms.  (The longer poem “Paglaba” has 97 words: more than  a quarter [25] are verbs and verb-cognates.)  The rich use of verbals throughout this collection is not just incidentally an aspect of the Waray; these are also the poet’s choices.  These voluptuously lucid, sumptuous portraits of the Waray by verbs occur because of Oyzon’s aesthetic: he believes that our ordinary lives are powerful, and the power of the ordinary is the arena of art.  Verbs are the snapshot of that individuation, conjugating, dividing and splicing time and moments, establishing the concrete absolutely.  Oyzon does this well.  His poetry makes apparent and transparent the nature of our language, which is, of course, our self.  And this is why an maupay hini nga koleksyon an paggamit ni Oyzon hin Waray: maabtik, nakakapanguga, pataraw-an, mahinumdumon. 

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THE WARAY, ACCORDING TO OYZON

Book review by Michael Carlo C. Villas

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An Maupay ha mga Waray ug iba pa nga mga siday

Voltaire Q. Oyzon

NCCA and UPV Tacloban Creative Writing Program

Manila, 2008; 59 pp

It was probably the fourth or fifth draft of An Maupay ha mga Waray when Voltaire Oyzon first showed it to me for review. It was a sheaf of poems from seven years of writing. Forty-seven poems in Waray, a major Philippine language spoken in Samar island and Leyte’s western half, fill this volume. From its very title, An Maupay ha mga Waray is a book for and about the Warays. It means “The Good Thing about Warays” or “Our virtue as Warays.”

An irony, though, is to be noted because even if the book has the word “good” or “virtue” in its title, depending on how one translates maupay into English, the book doesn’t simply give the reader good feelings. Tagnok, as said in Merlie Alunan’s introduction, is an apt word to describe the effect of this entire poetry collection. Like that tiny, pesky insect, every poem in this book disturbs as much as delights. Halfway through the collection, the reader may just find himself studded with “insect bites” somewhere in his/her dughan, which for me, is the symbolic seat of the Waray person’s human center. Maybe you’ll find yourself laughing and sympathizing with Man Uyik, Baoy, Tipay, Dansoy, Anling, among the many characters speaking in An Maupay. It is this proficiency with listening to the people in the Barugo of his imagination that Oyzon creates for us worlds we know exist but because of their ordinariness, we hardly sense them.

Oyzon knows where his native tongue glides and sags, where he can sing the siday with the tact and restraint of a musician. Waray rings in his ear, with its tones, accents, and rhythms coming to life, “with the delicacy and finesse required by the poetic processes. Best of all, in his memory were a gallery of personae to speak his poetry for him, stored from a childhood spent in Barugo…” An Maupay is Waray language in the fine, flowing form of the verse livre.

The collection is, thus, a slight breaking away from the tradition of rhymed, metered verse promoted by the Sanghiran poets and imitated by the DYVL Puplonganon poets, a long-running radio poetry contest in local station, DYVL. I say “slight” because Oyzon still writes along the tradition of the social commentary abundant in the works of the Sanghiran members. The Sanghiran is a group composed of Waray-waray’s literary luminaries then, the likes of Iluminado Lucente, Vicente de Veyra, Eduardo Makabenta, Norberto Romualdez, and Casiano Trinchera. The DYVL siday, in form and to some extent, in content, goes along with the Sanghiran’s poetics, except, of course, for its outright hortatory tone, which seems to issue from a single person of moral authority addressing a faceless audience. An Maupay is of a different quality: Oyzon lilts with his Waray, but bares the human heart with humility, as in the poem, An Gugma (Love):

bisan paghadson

ngan bisan pagsunugon

kun hira—sugad han kugon

ngan han tuna—

nagkakaayon,

maturok nga maturok

la gihapon.

Even if cut/ and burned/ if, like the grass/ and the soil, they are content with each other,/ they will grow/ and be growing still. (Translation by Janis Claire B. Salvacion)

Oyzon here uses the end rhyme on to sustain the music of the poem. With tight and neat lines, the poem as in other poems in the volume like Liso, Lubi, Mga Pakiana, Yana nga aadto ka na tumabok hinin salog, and Hiagi conjures the feeling of suddenness. In fact, the collection begins and ends with poems of this kind, thus, Pagsidlit han adlaw ha Kankabatok: usa ka aga and Yana, making compact poems woven along various themes. Pagsidlit is a poem of how one remembers someone he loves, one morning, while watching the Kankabatok sunrise. Yana is a poem about the need to let go because the now, our yana, is only good for that moment.

With the poems in between, one senses a maturing of voice: from the juvenile preoccupations of the poems from An Pagsidlit to Pagtambal ni Apoy Kuwa han piol ni Anling, an iya ulitawohay nga apo, interrupted somewhere in the middle by a graphic innovation called An Talipsay han Gugma, to the witnessing power of the protest poems, Didto ha Amon, Hi Salvador, Kawatan ako, Para han mga tudlo nga naglara hinin akon duyan nga uway, Pagbarol, Nagbalyo-balyo ako hin Nanay, and Paghimaya, to the mocking laughter prevalent in Waray country, rife with all its irony, in the poems, An Maupay ha mga Waray, Kan Totoy pag-asoy han agsob nga karantahay ha ira balay, Lagong, and An paghugos ni ‘Tay Gayok kan Man Uyik nga parahubog, to issues of a grieving heart from the poem, Yana nga aadto ka na tumabok hinin salog to Yana.

When read by a Waray living the lives of the personae in the poems, a sudden grab on the throat is felt. This is because An Maupay is an artistic and honest account of and for the Waray, how he/she lives, dies, attends funerals, says yes, loves, copes with and resists the changes confronting his culture and language. Oyzon’s poetry is a violent incision on the social and economic conditions that continue to alienate people in this part of the country from his own home, language, and culture. This is where his poems become unsettling because the situations depicted are lived realities, like poverty, for instance, which continues to drag us into the limbo of choicelessness: “Kay dinhi hini nga dapit/ mapili ka la han kauunongan—/ an bala,/ o an kawarayan.” (For in these parts,/ only two choices remain:/ the bullet/ or poverty.) As a poet immersed in the lifeways of the Waray people, Voltaire Oyzon has achieved much for his own culture: the critical, insightful voice so few in this side of the world.

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An Maupay ha mga Waray

It is the first solo poetry collection I’ve come across in Waray…[T]his poetry collection by a young Waray poet will go a long way in reviving a moribund…literary tradition.

-Anonymous (Reader A)

From Readers Evaluation Report

Subcommittee on Literary Arts

National Commission for Culture & the Arts

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An Maupay ha mga Waray

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The poems contained in this book gave me goosebumps!

-Laureen R. Mondoñedo

Sun.Star Network Online

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An Maupay ha mga Waray

Voltaire Q. Oyzon’s “An Maupay ha mga Waray…” is commendable for its zestful portrayal of the Waray sensibility in contemporary lingo while evoking human concerns: love, jealousy, the search for identity, physical and spiritual poverty, memories, and the gains and losses that men and women live with in this business of living.

-David A. Genotiva

Eastern Visayas State University

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