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Lillian Sciberras: Klessi-dra: Versi Taż-Żmien Maħrub. Horizons, 2013. 112pp.
Lillian Sciberras is well known to most lovers of Maltese verse, even though she is not the most prolific of writers. She first came to wide public knowledge when she published, together with Mario Vella, Wara r-Repubblika in 1979, but then her poems have also appeared in the important anthologies Malta – the New Poetry, Crosswinds and L-Antologija tan-Natura, as well as in a variety of other anthologies and magazines.
As Adrian Grima says in his excellent and very perceptive foreword to the present volume, she writes in the context of, and partly in reaction to, civilisations that end up destroying what they have created.
Though she was in spirit one of the new poets of the late 1960s and 1970s, distinguishing herself as a feminist and an environ-mentalist in her writing, she has rarely strayed far from traditional verse forms. She is indeed one of a few of our poets who use rhyme sparingly but always effectively.
She has never made a cult of obscurity; the limpidity and musicality of her best lyrics elevates them to the plane of three of my favourite Maltese poets: Rosar Briffa, John Cremona and Joe Friggieri. Also, like these three writers, she is a prey to nostalgia for the people and events of the past, and like them and also like Oliver Friggieri, she has written memorably touching elegies about the people she has greatly loved.
The opening pages of the collection contain seven pieces first published in Wara r-Repubblika, whereas those in the rest of the book, all of which are given a date of composition or possibly of publication, have never been collected before, and some are being published the first time.
All the pieces in the first part and several of the early pieces include much of her best work. Iż-Żifna tal-Katavri shows us the author in a mood of vibrant anger in the face of what she sees as the political lethargy of her people.
Il-Ballata tal-Ballata, rightly praised by Grima, is based on a pun on the word meaning ‘ballad’. It stands for a dreary and wearying job in roof-construction, one of the very few women jobs could aspire to in the past.
It is a strongly rhythmical work that embodies Sciberras’s appeal to other women to rise against their economic slavery. Only two ways are open to them: either kissing the hand that feeds them or collectively shake their fists in the face of those exploiting them.
A piece like 1979 again shows us the poet as the person deeply committed to politics she once was, while Aljenazzjoni, written during her student years in London, makes her observe the endless queues of commuters in the city as an image of the common person’s political alienation under capitalism.
I would strongly recommend this small volume to all lovers of Maltese poetry
A similar power vibrates through It-Tnejn Strieħu bħas-Soltu, in which a wretchedly poor woman who has just lost her beloved partner, commits suicide. The phrase “drank the liquid of death, her Last Comm-union” embodies Sciberras’s scorn for the bigoted neighbours, whose discussion is solely about whether the couple had been truly married and whether the woman’s suicide could ever lead to her eternal life.
The author has always nourished some form of spirituality, but it appears to me that perhaps it is only in more recent poems that she approaches some form of Christian belief, as in her fine variations on the Our Father prayer: Lejn Missierna – lejn dubju u mhux.
What she undoubtedly seems to cling to is a belief in eternal life, a life in which she will rejoin her much-loved parents and the dear sisters whose fairly early loss to disease caused her deep sorrow and a sense of deprivation.
Tifkira (lil ommi), which is perhaps the finest of this group of poems, is based on a touching memory of childhood in which the author’s mother, who is cuddling her in their home’s tree-shaded courtyard, tenderly tells her little daughter, “When we die, we can go wherever we wish, so you and I shall choose to come back to this courtyard”. Her heaven doesn’t seem to be a great place of light and angelic hosannahs, but a familiar little place where she can eternally renew a great happiness.
Sciberras is a great lover of unspoilt nature and so, of course, laments its great degradation in Malta under a succession of governments. I particularly like Iltiema, in which a woman she calls Benduwa n-Naxxarija whose field is the last remaining piece of undeveloped earth in the midst of Naxxar, but is acquired by a developer, feels “her heart seemingly emptied of the meaning life had for her” and that “the relentless destruction of earth” was making men and animals orphans.
Sciberras comes back to the sea she so much loves again and again, her most powerful poem, one of the best in the collection, being L-Għanja tal-Baħar, in which the sea itself proudly proclaims itself as the source of life on earth and as the colleague of worlds beyond ours: “I recognise the universe’s worlds; as they pass over me; attracting me then letting me go; while from the infinite height they inhabit; they look down on me with endless love.”
In a number of love poems, the meeting of eyes, the clasping of hands, lead to moments of deep happiness. In Ġieli f’Għajnejk we see the poet reading her beloved’s eyes as mirrors of the sea, calm or raging, she loves so much, but sometimes recognising in them the despair of one who can never find the perfection she seeks, until she sees in them a loving gleam that seeks her lover’s response.
I was amused to see how Sciberras, a lover of the poet Cavafy, and a book lover/librarian for much of her life, finds the one volume in the library containing Cavafy’s poems and thanks a book-worm for riddling the volume’s spine but letting the beloved text go scot free.
I would strongly recommend this small volume to all lovers of Maltese poetry.