[attach id=249281 size="medium"][/attach]
Joe W. Psaila, Fil-Aħħ u l-Baħ Poeżiji minn ġol-paraxut tat-Tama. Gozo Press. 2013, 150 pp.
One of Gozo’s less-known poets who has slowly established himself as one of the island’s leading poets is undoubtedly Joe Psaila, a middle-aged poet from Victoria who spent his life in the education sector.
Fil-Aħħ u l-Baħħ is the fourth anthology Psaila has given us. The first was called Graffiti f’Gerduf, evoking one of Gozo’s earliest Christian sites and published in 1993. It was followed by Xewqat a decade later and the very inspiring Tabilħaqqiet Varji u Taparsijiet Veri in 2006.
His latest anthology is mainly inspired by the unexpected death of his dear wife Mary-Jane a couple of years ago, a difficult moment in the poet’s life that must have devastated him to the point of creating a barrage of poems inspired by the sad event.
The voice of a soul in grief, crying out for the presence of its lost partner
Poetry is the language of the heart. It has been said that every human being is born a poet. However, not every human being is given the gift of poetic expression.
The poet who actually writes poetry therefore has a representative role, in the sense that he represents the entire community in his expression of the deepest emotions.
Psaila’s Fil-Aħħ u l-Baħħ is the voice of a soul in grief, crying out for the presence of its lost partner, the other half that nobody can replace. It is quite common for a married poet to sing his suffering and grief in his melancholic verses.
Anton Buttigieg, the poet of nature, wrote a poem dedicated to his deceased wife; it is known as Il-Mewt tas-Sieħba.
Rużar Briffa, dubbed the poet of childhood and beauty, was also influenced by the death of his wife and the theme of suffering surfaces quite often in his poetry. Psaila continues on this tradition, airing his sentiments of grief through profound thoughts fossilised in words.
The book’s foreword is rich in meaning. It is in itself a spiritual treatise and uncovers, in the most manifest of manners, the religious profundity and the rock-hard faith of Psaila the poet who even in his “dark night” – to use St John of the Cross’s classical phrase – remained true to his faith and in the company of God who walks with him.
Grief can either lead to the loss of faith or to its enrichment. In Psaila’s case, death, which he nicknames the great leveller, is not to be abhorred but rather embraced. And like Jacopone da Todi, the Italian poet to whom the legendary Stabar Mater is attributed, he chooses to make peace with it and live through.
The poet’s one and only tool that helps him and protects him from falling into the abyss of the existential angst is the “parachute of hope” from the title. As he opens a dialogue with the creator in the poem Ordnajt Ħarifa, Psaila acknowledges the fact that although he has ordered an autumn from the restaurant of life, he has been given spring instead.
As Trevor Zahra’s Stella, Jien u Hu came to mind, I read Psaila’s poem Int, Hu u Jien, in which he comes to terms with the summoning of his wife by God to eternal life – “ġbartha għalik bla kliem u bla sliem” (you called her to you unexpectedly) – and then he is invited by the Almighty to stand on his feet and continue his earthly journey.
Psaila’s latest collection of poetry is a hymn in honour of a loving wife who has impoverished the life of her husband with her going away to a better life; one has no choice but to accept Arthur Schopenhauer’s famous dictum: “Without death, neither philosophy nor poetry would have existed.” Psaila has proved him right all the way.