A few days ago, the President of the Republic, Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, hosted a literary and musical evening at San Anton, when Clare Agius and Jimi Busittil from the film Simshar, and members of the Malta Poetry Association, read poems by Lucilla Maclaren Spillane, with musical interludes by Xandrija, violin, and pianists Alex Manché and Tricia Dawn Williams.

For many people poetry is just a cryptic message, full of metaphors and similes, which as common mortals they cannot understand, unless the works are elucidated by an expert critic. This is where Lucilla Maclaren Spillane excels. The beauty of her poetry lies in that it does not need the backing of literary critics to be understood. Maclaren Spillane introduces the reader to a different world, a world of poetry that can be read on more than one plateau and this is because she gives the background to her poetry. Her work is an expression of acute sensitivity and reflects the inner voice of a female mystic.

True poets are those who are capable of transmitting their inner feelings in simple words. Lucilla succeeds in conveying not just her ingrained feeling but also her hidden thoughts so that whoever reads her poems discovers that these black letters, which form words, are expressing the inner, but unspoken, thinking of the contemporary world. This is why I dare call Lucilla a ‘prophetess.’ Indeed, she is a prophetess each time she highlights, in her economy of words, her quest for a new spirituality. She is not there to give us answers but to convey this inner search.

This is what poets in the past did. They transmitted their message of love to humanity in verse, while prophets and prophetesses transmitted their ideas in fiery tones. I find Maclaren Spillane’s poems extremely religious, but her religiosity, like that of the prophets in both the Old and the New Testament, is disassociated from that of formal institutions. One could define it as a secular spirituality or religiosity, by which I mean the love for the simple things of nature and the complexity of human behaviour.

Even her lighter poems, which are funny and enjoyable, transmit the pleasure of being. The job of the old prophets was not only to speak in terms of fire and aberration but also to poke fun at their contemporary world. The good prophets were those who said things as they were. This Lucilla does, for her poems are 'up front,' recounting the depth and reality of day-to-day existence.

To-day, over half of the world’s population survives in a wilderness of concrete. The modern desert no longer consists of an ocean of sand. It is now merely a faceless urban jungle where millions of people interact with each other without ever succeeding in establishing a lasting human relationship and where nature itself now fears to tread.

This is a rare instance where, thanks to Lucilla Maclaren Spillane, English poetry is once again an enjoyable experience. The delicate and fragile voice of this woman is there to lend a hand to modern Man to bear, what the Czech author Milan Kundera rightly defined as the “unbearable lightness of being”, the pointlessness of modern life.

 

‘Another Seeing’ is available from the leading book shops in Malta.