?BELIEVE AND BETRAY: NEW AND COLLECTED Poems by Cirilo F. Bautista? (De La Salle University Press Inc., 2006, 347 pages) is one glowing proof that the Filipino as poet could write big. This latest collection, a massive compendium of Cirilo?s poetry, past, present and new, is one book which is impossible to exhaust in one reading, in many readings, in countless repeated readings.

Its infinite possibilities one can touch but briefly and with a measure of timidity and trepidation, awe and wonder. One review cannot encompass this opus which is as expansive, profound, as it is elusive.

?Believe and Betray? is primarily about beliefs, betrayals, chances, certainties, believing, being betrayed, where the poet speaks loudly of poetry as act of self-liberation only to expose its illusory promise.

In her introduction, Marjorie Evasco says ?poetry like Bautista?s shapes for us our first and only frontier of being.?

But where is Cirilo in the many varied voices he intones, masks he puts on? Is it in the poet lashing against a country?s ills, the massive poverty in body and spirit, empathizing with the tear-gassed man in an explosive demo, or is it in the achingly lyrical reaching out to a Muse he tries to embrace from a safe distance?

His ?Ars Poetica? is intriguing, and, in four five-line stanzas, speaks of an uncanny experience brought about by this materializing out of nowhere of a kitten to offer his unreasoning love, too close and too feeling for poetry.

The poet, while going through a paper where Galway Kinnell speaks of Robert Frost reading his inaugural poem? becomes aware of this kitten? ?felt the warm rise/ and fall of his abdomen, the wispy air he exhaled, the space he carved between my eyes/ and the book, this sonofabitch kitty / who came from nowhere to offer me his love/ he is the one poem I can never write.?

And so the poet writes a love poem about a kind of love, closeness, sudden inexplicable intimacy that can never be a poem. The paradox is telling. Poetry then must maintain the safest distance, not merely felt, but not contemplated dry either, lest the magic goes.

Not about love

In ?Athens, Ohio, One Winter Night? (second version), there is this chance overhearing of the voices of young lovers quarreling outside his window.

??You never loved me,? a boy outside my window/ shouted breaking the cold crystal night/ ?Why should I love you?? a girl shouted back/ sounds of car doors slamming engines kicking...?

Follows the force of the poet?s avowal: ?They would not know about love, I was sure/ that was their strength? love flew away with knowledge and concealed speeches.?

The last lines are unforgettably evocative: ?Just like those lovers/ sipping wine now in some secret caf� and holding hands, I would draw some fiery warmth/ from the incalculable? the thought of home/ a finished poem, a star? such things, such things.?

Bautista?s poetry bristles with felt truths and meanings. But no critic concerned only with meanings can touch its true ?being.? Because, in a sense, no matter how much the poet may concede to the pressures of social, moral, political, historical realities, his ultimate faith is always in the demands of the artistic event.

He may at times resort to almost prose as in ?We Are Doing a Survey,? a series of questions and answers, discursive lines finally pulled taut and lyric, with ?Is lack of money a problem?/ Only when I breathe, only when I breathe.?

Tragic deaths

Most tragic is the death of the likes of the masters Neruda, Pound, Auden, Aquinas, and, worse, the poet in him, as poignantly he writes from a hotel in Sorrento, ?...this was the deeper death/ to be disowned by words/ and therefore to be/ silent amongst the living realities/ of being? Oh, he was dead, this the most dark perishing??

But, of course, this one poet is always intensely alive singing his pain, everybody?s pain, his country?s pain. Difficult reading, his poetry, but whenever he comes across, he does so with such power and force, for Bautista enjoins his readers to read subtext more than text, read what is not there, which is, essentially, the poem, ?more to the nothing between the silence than the silence.?

His ?Fourteen Stations of the Cross? is both celebratory and cerebral, more philosophy than theology, and truly eloquent, forcing the reader to cerebrate with him, to enjoy as well if he so deserves.

His poems for Rose Marie are poetry?s stays against confusion, all arrogance ejected, passion finally unleashed. ?How then do I sing the sweetness in her name/ with these poor lines, wretched poet as I am??

Here is a love poet who disclaims this fact even as he sings it loudest in his silences. He assumes a safe distance even as he is all over, and we follow breathless: ?The sea cannot touch me now /nor the sky/ in this room whose arms are your arms??

Gift of utterance

Even while his poetry drifts along parallel to historical moments, it remains firstly and most importantly the poet?s gift of expression and utterance, elevating even seemingly common resources of language.

The power of his poetry lies in this double nature of poetry: poetry as magical incantation, a matter of sound and rhythm; and poetry as expression of true meaning, commanding both emotional assent and intelligent inquisition and probing of human experience.

Reading Bautista is reading Larkin, Lowell, Auden, Ashberry, Heaney, and more in the sense that his poetry, finally, has the robustness, the integrity, the authority, and the historical sense of these masters? oeuvres. The poet?s audacity and flexibility of form is predicated on the conviction that depth of vision, force of passion, profundity of insight or whatever it is that distinguishes art from mere craft invariably demands certain appropriate formal maneuverings.

This explains the rich literary fare offered by the book, the variety of literary strategies employed to match the massive range and diversity of topics, subjects, and insights covered. Simply astounding.