Poet Mario Azzopardi keeps regenerating himself in a new anthology of poems and prose-poems published by Horizons.  PATRICIA GATT reviews the collection.

In an age of luvvies and media hype Mario Azzopardi, an author who has built and cemented an artistic career as an iconoclast who opposes institutional rigidity and group- think, perseveres in projecting a poetic voice that is highly distinctive within local literary production.  It's a voice that persists in finding ways to articulate the grand themes of human existence, doggedly refusing to regard poetry simply as entertainment or therapy in its insistence that readers' step out of their comfort zone of passive indifference that feeds into an attitude of helpless resignation.

Commenting on the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) the English critic John Pilling writes that Baudelaire is a compulsively driven artist who is scrupulous in fulfilling his commitments as a poet.  Pilling approvingly describes Baudelaire as "a slave to a moral destiny."   Wary as we are of terms such as "moral destiny" with their connotations of delusional grandeur in the scheme of existence, Pilling's reading of Baudelaire is echoed in Mario Azzopardi's latest anthology of verse and prose-poems, Epistoli Mid-Deżert (Epistles from the Desert).  Even though in the Sixties Azzopardi, one of the leading protagonists of the Moviment Qawmien Letterarju, gained notoriety for his relentless criticism of institutional power, with the passage of time (and his work being included on academic curricula) his writing hasn't lost its bite.  One can even argue that in giving up the early poetic tricks, over the years Azzopardi's writing gained in its character of being a radical gesture against the amorality of contemporary economic, political and cultural structures.  However, even though he is still intent on gnawing away at such sites of power and privilege, the present collection of poetry and prose-poems highlights the poet's ongoing search for a renewed national and existential consciousness.  Almost ascetic in character, this strand in Azzopardi's artistic trajectory gains in significance, especially when analyzed alongside the poet's incessant parodying of  socially-construed identities ( seen in their extremity for a heightened satirical effect) at the core of human injustice.

What is immediately evident in Epistoli is that although Azzopardi's style has developed and matured, thematically he hasn't veered much from the subjects set out in his earliest works.    These include the use of provocation as an instrument for social change, the plight of disenfranchised people in society (migrants, refugees, the elderly and the sick, the poor and destitute), the denouncement of hypocrisy, the erotic and the existential conflict in the shadow of death.  What differs in this anthology is the poet's almost infinite variation in mood, tone and metaphorical breadth with which he treads familiar ground. 

The operative word of this collection is the "Desert" in the title, which Charles Briffa in his intriguing introduction to the collection observes is "the place where solitude is experienced most intensely.  The desert as a metaphor, Briffa argues, is a mirage as "it masks a buried reality that has to be found and excavated."  The desert also tests human physical endurance to its limits and this collection, with its many allusions to advancing age and failing health, depicts the poet digging deeper into his interiority.  Paradoxically, though, the desert is most acutely felt in the rough-and-tumble of life: Azzopadi introduces images like that of a fragile plant trying to shield itself from sweeping winds or a sailor's lonely death in a lighthouse.

 The desert, then, is the poetic consciousness reduced to its essence.  Reviewing Edward Said's posthumous work On Late Style for The New Yorker John Updike presents a a novel concept - it isn't death that haunts late works but "the author's previous works," he writes.  "He is burdensomely conscious hat he has been cast, unlike his ingénue self, as an author who writes in a certain way, with the inexorable consistency of his own handwriting...Successful late works, shed of "obscuring puppy fat" tend to have a translucent thinness," Updike concludes.  This observation is so true of the present anthology, especially if compared to Azzopardi's previous work, Il-Fabbrikant tal-Marjunetti (2012), whose density of thought and linguistic pyrotechnics contrast sharply with the relative simplicity of this book.

Epistoli mid-Deżert is divided into seven sections:  the search for the inner self from a post-avangardist stance, the spiritual quest, social protest and parody and confrontation with sites of power and prestige, artistic creativity in the shadow of death, poetry written during the poet's six-month sojourn in Australia in 2013 (in which he focuses on the hardships of the migrant experience and the disenfranchisement of the Aborigines through colonialism) and a section of prose poems. 

Asked to comment on this anthology Oliver Friggieri notes that in his experiments with creative language Azzopardi is steadily moving in the direction of the "true language of poetry: Silence."   Paradoxically this "silence", or peering into the void, is only attainable by means of the gaps and elisions within language itself.

Epistoli mid-Deżert is being launched at this year's Book Festival and will be available at the fair from Horizons' stand and at leading bookshops.