The poems included in this publication cover the period from 1994-2010. Five years earlier Buttigieg had published his first collection of poems, Nixtieqek terġa' tiġi (1989), which in a way set the pace for future renderings. The corpulent style adopted in the first publication was typically endearing in the sense that from early age the poet felt the need to grasp what constitutes the foundations of good verse, that is the traditional metric, which here takes an even stronger form in the repeated use of the heptameter or octameter and the endecasyllable respectively. In this regard the poems engender a rythmic opulence which shows that the poet managed to grasp the basic contours of the traditional verse forms to an extent that now he may proceed to delve further into the realms of inference or the art of breaking the rules after having ensured their mastery.

Qabel tagħmel ix-xita (When the sky clouds over) sheds light (or the lack of it) on the contrasting elements that form one itinerary in a longish journey that instigate for a search within. In a way the present publication brings on a horizontal plain two distinctive sides: on the one hand the pulsating rythm that pervades our existence (here represented in different shades of beauty) and on the other the mystery aspect, which in this particular collection is accompanied by discomfort charged with pain as the ultimate form or passageway which enables one to come to terms with oneself.

In this sense it is important that the collection is not read in isolation as poems overlap and at times refer to each other unconciously. The riveting energy they encapsulate resembles the splashing of colour on a white canvas expecting to be reined in with life. However, there is always the anxiety of the waiting, the unknown, the prospect of lagging behind and not being there when you need to. Here the hiatus of "waiting" is not disconnected from reality, but imbued in life to give life a recourse to connectivity. In fact the "waiting" in Buttigieg is not the vain and absurd waiting of Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Becket's play Waiting for Godot (1949). Here the waiting is classified and distinctive to an extent that both the waiting and the arrival are one and the same thing. Poems like Mediterranja, L-Eternità, Nistenniek, and Aurora, among others, portray this waiting-arriving intercourse at its best.

The publication is the first of three collections which form a trilogy. Once the three collections are published, the reader would be able to walk through a path that takes one from a state of waiting, onto the initimacy of silence and ends into a rediscovered space of contemplation.

Qabel tagħmel ix-xita was published by Horizons Publishers Ltd, edited by Dr Terence Portelli with an critical introduction by Professor Oliver Friggieri.