John Aquilina: Leħnek il-Libsa Tiegħi: poeżiji 1994-2009, Ed. Skarta. 70 pp.

John Aquilina’s slim collection of poetry, bound and printed very elegantly, makes me realise why a number of people think highly of him. He is still in his early 30s, an age when many versifiers often go for the recondite, the portentous, the obscure.

This, Aquilina does not do, nor did he do so when he wrote his first pieces in 1994, when still in his teens.

All the poems in this volume are in the most lucid of styles, giving the reader cause to pause and ponder only when clashes of imagery or the development of ideas in a very short space – all the poems range from short to very short – force the reader to try to reconstruct the connection of ideas or sensations in the author as he wrote.

What is also immediately noticeable is the restricted area of Aquilina’s inspiration. Whether in the first poems in the volume, presumably written in the mid-1990s, or in most of those in the last pages, written presumably within the last five years or so, the poet is obsessed with the passionate sexual relationship he has with a nameless woman.

Is the woman for whom he writes in his early years the same as the one who is the subject of his much later poems? My guess is they must be different persons – could the same person continue to excite in him feelings of frustration and sorrow after so many years?

On the other hand, the late group of poems end with what seems like a final break between the two, though the author is still groping desperately for reconciliation.

Very few of the poems express the joy of a young love that is working. Even Raxx, perhaps the only piece in which the author writes with wonder about sexual relations, has a sinister notes: “blood oozed from my soul/and stained the floor.”

In the early poems, the feeling is of doubt caused by a person who is both formidable – an image associated with her a few times is that of a mountain – and at the same time capable of destroying the lover’s peace of mind with her tearfulness.

In Temi bin-Niket she is even threatening to commit suicide, and when the two are intimate, she is capable of filling him with foreboding: “Afar the moon hid itself/her shadow grew heavier / in my fancy she became a dolomite.”

The author seems to be fascinated by death which can threaten – see for instance Min Jaf Fihiex Ugigħ? – but can also promise a relief from sorrow and despair.

Three verses from ‘In-Niket bħaż-Żmien’ encapsulate very well this association between erotic love and death: “You summon passion to open its petals/and again we make love as the rain falls furiously/then death smiles at us over the river.”

His relationship with his lover is an uneasy one, a defensive one. A recurring image is that of a fortified town within which he is sheltering.

In Figurini he predicts that his lover will one day capture the town , after which “you will be able to pick up the fragments left of me/you will see me, and love me again as you did before.” Clearly, she is the dominant person in the relationship. No wonder she is seen as a mountain, a dolomite.

The later poems include a couple of the best in the volume. In Ħbula, “These ropes have not drawn me to you/they have instead tightened round my neck/and robbed my lungs of breath. Your words/like tiny fingers hasten to unloose the knots/they are not consoling but elegiac.”

And in Vulkani his pain when perceiving how his beloved’s love has grown so cool can be sensed pressing against the restraint and dignity of his words: “Since the day your love for me cooled down, and I resumed/the journey I had stopped for you, I’ve never ceased to carry you within me/as I did in past days. Now you’re no longer here/my tears pour down in prayer for everything to start again.”

Will Aquilina’s poetry explore a much wider field than it has done so far? His sensitivity in writing about one relationship should serve him well if he should explore the world and society around him. A few poems in this volume such as Il-Qaħba, Għal Ommi and Bath show how well he can write if he leaves his obsession behind him.