This essay has to start somewhere, so it starts at the beginning, with the poem Ġenesi, which goes as far back as the Bible or genetics can take us. For, as T.S. Eliot says in Little Gidding, "What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning."
The poet has to use words, so Eliot goes on, "And every phrase / And sentence that is right .../ Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat."
Mizzi starts his poem which starts his new collection, at the point where order issues from chaos - Tohu wa-bohu ( a Biblical Hebrew phrase found in the Book of Genesis 1:2 that describes the condition of the earth before God said, "Let there be light" Gen. 1:3). - you wake, presumably from sleep, perhaps drunk with half-remembered dreams, as the ticking of time's clocks signal the oneness of time, past present and future, in an ongoing ritual of stupefaction.
Mizzi is a wordsmith dragging words out of time's closets matching them with merry-go-rounds of suggestions, here in this one poem, from anatomy, physics, genetics, evolution, mythology, Plato's music of the spheres, Gray's Bard at the edge of the precipice, yin and yang and a thousand other subtleties that might have emerged from the cauldron's broth of inspiration. And all that in one poem of barely a hundred words. This is typical of Mizzi.
Having been asked to review this latest collection of Achille Mizzi's work, I searched my archives for the number of times I have written or spoken about this poet. On the numerous occasions in several newspapers and journals, radios and lecture halls, I have already said much that I had to say. The wonder goes on.
My first review of Mizzi came as a chance encounter with Guze Diacono at the entrance to Valletta in the late seventies, during which after I had expressed a liking for Mizzi's poems against his uncertainty. He suddenly drew out a copy of Mizzi's new publication with the words, "Since you can understand him, you can write a review of this for Il-Malti. Let's see what you can make of it." He had thrown down the gauntlet. That was for me the beginning of a long career.
I have variously described Mizzi as a volcano for his outbursts of fury and energy; a wordsmith for his way with words that tease, draw out and pour like molten metal; a metaphysical who questions things back to their inner core; a sensualist who tests nature with all his senses; a voyeurist who follows the sexual urges of life not only in humanity but also in flowers and insects. You can find poems illustrating all this in the present collection.
Above all you can find here an ongoing harangue of our existence. Why are things the way they are, where can justice be found, where peace, where good? Mizzi looks around but also inside himself for the questions of what and where and why. He turns to religion and myth, philosophy and astronomy, evolution and popular lore. To live is to question, but where are the answers?
What is Mizzi angry about, for he is angry? Why does he fret, struggle, scream at the top of his voice, ruffling the feathers of all creation and shaking the aeons of time. Like Jacob with the angel he wrestles with God because he must: he cannot not wrestle with him, or not hold him responsible. Like Job he has questions to put to God, questions that all men have asked since they first walked on this earth, but never had any answers, because there are no answers but only resolutions.
It is what we have seen happening in the Book of Job. He too worries why he was born, why he suffers, why there is no painless way to apprehend the beauty of the world. But then God appears out of the clouds and proceeds to ask questions himself. These turn out to be a boastful roundup of creation, so beautiful that it is absolutely beyond man's understanding. What does Job know about the house of the winds, or the abode of the weathers, or how the wild goat of the mountain gives birth without assistance, untaught except by God himself? If Job has no idea how to make a horse, a whale, a crocodile or a hippo, let him keep his mouth shut, and open it only in admiration. Creation makes God proud.
Perhaps I may be allowed here to quote a few words I once wrote on Mizzi: "For this poet, as indeed for the rest of us, whether we realize it now or later, life is a continual struggle. His struggle is with words, but with things as they are, and with laws of nature and laws of God even though they are one, and with the weariness of life. There is depth in this poet, profundity, sacredness, a sense of duty to speak out, a vexing rumbling inside him that yearns to encapsulate words." (Re Eklissi Perpetwi)
With the advance of science, language is becoming more and more called to do the impossible. In 'Quantum Poetics', arguing about mathematical versus verbal exposition of matters of physics, Samuel Matlack says, "This means that the widely shared ideal of describing ultimate reality purely in terms of physics is futile, at least if we mean verbal, not mathematical, description. And if poetry is necessary for talking about the foundations of physical reality, this should both elevate the importance of poetry and help to disabuse us of the idea that we can exclude the more personal, parochial, poetic forms of language and still truly apprehend reality." Ah.... Reality escapes our verbal grasp - like an oily octopus.
Admiration of nature, and of the senses, and of all things that make up the world, and all that makes us human, can be found in plenty in Mizzi's poem. It can be found in his dynamic use of metaphor. It is while he questions truth that he paints beauty in a duality of concordance that is a synthesis of two threads of existence, the material and the metaphysical. This happens in the smelting of existential angst with metaphorical experience in the crucible of linguistic fireworks.
For Mizzi has a battle with language, not with Maltese as such, but with language. Why were we given language, if words betray in a prismatic refraction of ambiguity? Hence, Mizzi's language is taut, whipped, itself and yet not just itself, any more than a conch or sea-shell is just a conch or a sea-shell.
The books' worth is further raised by the presence of a biography, interview, and studies of Mizzi's work.