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John Cremona: Il-Kantiku tax-Xagħra. Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2012, illustrations by Luciano Micallef. 144 pp.
It is never any wonder that lawyers write poetry. In the popular mind they are not only in love with words, which they manipulate and turn around every which way for best effect and extension. They, the lawyers, are also in love with the sound of their own voice. Hence, they are all natural poets.
This is not so easily the case with the poetry of John Cremona. Here we have a very timid man who conserves energy by sitting in a metaphorical rocking chair as he ruminates on the past which is called up by the present. He has few words, his verses close quickly, and his thoughts are shorn and pithy, often coming from the natural habitat with recollections from the past. He brings these thoughts to the projection stage by juxtaposing elements which do not normally go together. It isn’t difficult to remember that Cremona cut his poetic teeth in Italy in the days when the surrealists and futurists held sway.
He brings these thoughts to the projection stage by juxtaposing elements which do not normally go together
“What is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?” Indeed. But few have the leisure, the opportunity and the guts to look back meaningfully, and perhaps shed a tear of gratitude for the good fortune that is past. Old age provides that opportunity, though without an automatic guarantee of purposefulness, as in the case of Cremona with his store of laurels.
There’s been a spate of books about and by people at the end of their life: Christopher Hitchens, Steve Jobs and Randy Pausch, whose Last Lecture became a You Tube sensation. There was also Philip Gould who described the tenderness “utterly dependent on the knowledge that I was going to die, and that I would soon be dead. Death is immensely cruel, but also immensely powerful”.
Knowing that you are near the end of life can be liberating, as you wait for it to happen.
Cremona is full of life, but there’s no denying that this volume of poetry reveals him in a restful, meditative mood. It is a mood that looks back, yes, but keeps a firm seat on the present like the poet himself in his rocking chair of memories. He even ventures at times at a future prospect inspired by his Christian faith. This past, present and future is evident in the only poem of the last section, called Il-Ħajja (Life).
More is revealed in the very first poem of the first section, Il-Kantiku tax-Xagħri (Canticle of the Wilderness). A difficult and symbolically involved poem, it treats fruit ripening under the sun and juicy lips of mellowing times, memories of childhood against existential quests for understanding in an endless unfolding of years, a search for meaning and goals, direction and final destination, with a visit to the (Platonic?) cave of childhood for the sibyl’s flow of words.
And to say nothing of the female voice that beckons, corrects and connects things. The advice comes to kill the past and bury the future; to which the unquiet poet replies that he cannot do so while the past overcomes him and intimations of the future oppress him.
The other two sections are dedicated to his deceased wife Beatrice and to Peter Serracino Inglott respectively, both loved figures that have passed away from his eyes – his wife’s absence being very differently and most intensely felt. Her shadow falls athwart this poet’s struggling embers and figure in many of the poems in this collection.
The common figures recall sunsets and silences, vast silent piazzas and annoying doubts, embers and waning fires, fugitive cats in the public squares and new-born kittens drowning in a tub of water, the futile rat race of daily life and the permanence of moon and seagulls, but above all the unanswerable questions of life.
Cremona’s Sybil tells him that “Minn jgħaġġel jgħix jgħaġġel ukoll imut” (If you live fast you die fast). In Issa li Ntfew il-Ħġejjeġ (Now that the fires are out) the poet looks for the struggling embers of the life that’s past, with its stories leaf-dried, and the skies busy with seagulls and clouds, wondering about those eternal questions so far without an answer.
It is almost as if we have reached the stage where there is nothing more to add to the other poet’s: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player; That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more; a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.”
We know that nothing comes from nothing, but Cremona’s is a rich kind of commodity.