Aniceto Obrero Llaneta

     ESTRELLA MAQUEDA is the nom de plume of Aniceto O. Llaneta, a writing fellow of the U. P. Creative Writing Center in Diliman, Quezon City, a three-time FOCUS Philippines special awardee in poetry and a prize-winning creative photographer.

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     The poems in English in this collection are only a few of his many prize-winning poetry that have been published in FOCUS Philippines, Philippines FREE PRESS, Philippine Daily Star Magazine, The Manila Times Sunday Magazine, MOD Magazine, Women Magazine and special publications.

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     In selecting EM's best poetry in Waray, we used the English translations as guide. Strangely but interestingly, he writes his Waray poetry in the style of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and the American poet Walt Whitman. On the other hand, his poetry in English have been variously influenced by the Russian Nobel Prize laureate, Boris Pasternak, the English Nobel Prize laureate, T. S. Eliot, and the Spanish Nobel Prize laureate, Federico Garcia Lorca.

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      A longer exposition on his writings should be able to explain how EM mixed the linguistic affinities, poetical idioms, recurrent themes, commonality of symbols and the nuances of language of these influences in the alchemist's pot or the magician's hat and came up with an amalgam of literary configurations that is astonishingly unique and wonderful poetry.

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     In prose as well as in some of his longer poems, EM is a master satirist with a biting sense of humor and a deftness with the English and the Waray languages that can only be the result of the definitive influence of his mentor, the prose stylist Kerima Polotan.

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     In time, we hope to put out a book of EM's short stories in English and Waray which altogether portrays a different view of this quiet, unassuming and gentle wordsmith.

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LETICIA G. BAUTISTA

M. A. (Journalism)

College of Mass Communication

U. P. Diliman, Quezon City