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Maria Grech Ganado: Taħt il-Kpiepel ta’ Għajnejja. Klabb Kotba Maltin, 2014. 96pp.

Maria Grech Ganado has long been a leading poet writing in Maltese as well as in English. She is notable for her relentless self-anatomising, especially since this passionate woman started looking at her aging body brutally and with self-loathing, but never with self-pity.

Her collections Iżda Mhux Biss and Skond Eva (2001) and her outstanding collection of verse, Ribcage (2003) , as well as this new collection under review, show her making variations on what I call psychological strip-tease.

In the poem Fifty-five (Ribcage) she describes herself as un-zipping her aging body and in a poem published in the present volume, Milord/Ix-Xwejħa u s-Suldat, an old woman who is approached for sex takes out a young body, neatly folded and mothballed in a drawer, dons it and gives the soldier what he wants. In the two poems the author sees old bodies and youthful ones as objects that often serve as disguising a person’s inner nature, that nature which cannot be donned at will.

A few of the poems in this volume treat subjects like friend-ship, the environment or her experiences of treatment for her bipolar disorder, but many of them are new explorations of heterosexual love, a couple of them celebrating moments of joy, but most of them divulging a dark sadness when faced with indifference or rebuttal.

In Temminx Fija she writes of the volcano hidden deep within her producing lava that burns her eyes as her desires remain unfulfilled; her refrain “qalbi” saying more than anything else.

Her desolation comes out even stronger in Żipp where her unzipping in public of her mouth, through her poetry among other ways, brings no relief, leading her to return to her solitary existence indoors, “seeking a narrow space where to hide”.

In Tnejn Jippasiġġjaw a healthy country scene provides a pitiful study in contrast between a young woman moving lightly like a breeze and an old woman, gray-haired and moving awkwardly. Here, it is not the loss of love that makes her sorrowful, but the cruel realisation that the life of young energy and joy is well beyond her. In this poem, the intelligent and emotionally rich self cannot come to the rescue of a body that has become less and less responsive.

In her Ribcage collection the author included a very successful section called Per-sonae in which she uses famous characters from mythology like Penelope and Jocasta and from literature, such as Ophelia, to shed by inference light on her own existential problems.

The collection can speak, sometimes very eloquently, to all perspicacious readers of Maltese poetry

Probably inspired by Carol Ann Duffy’s superb The World’s Wife, this sequence saw Grech Ganado get away from writing directly about herself and writing fascinatingly about characters we have all thought about. In the present volume she includes one very short poem belonging to the same genre, Għajrek, on the famous meeting of Jesus with the Samaritan woman.

Here it is the woman who speaks: “The well of mercy is bottomless/if you would drink from it, just ask me/my beliefs are not like yours./I am a Samaritan.”

It may not be one of the author’s best poems, but one cannot but be impressed by how she makes the woman, an insignificant woman but a woman, take the initiative in an encounter with a great religious leader. The bottomless well of mercy must also symbolise the author’s readiness to forgive, even after long years of sadness and disappointment.

She has always been attracted to writing short poems, but here she has included two pieces, Borma and Id-Differenza, that are longer,with each one written in three sections.

In the former, the first section, called Minestra, is about the vegetable ingredients of this vegetable soup. Superficially it is straightforward, but a careful re-reading reveals a slightly sinister element: carrot strips likened to corpses ready to be coffined and the wise remark that “only the housewife knows what’s in the pot”.

In the second section, Partition of the Ingredients, it begins to appear that the pot may be the conjugal home that is being parcelled out to spouses who have split up.

She brings out the uneasiness of the proceedings such as when “Odd, but I turn to him for comfort/as we share out the furniture”. Never has the author brought out so poignantly her experience of marital breakup. The third section, also beautifully written, is about crucial moments in life that she likens to a suspended water drop.

The few poems expressing joy after successful love experiences show her writing verses that slip along and glide freely, particularly in Nitkellmu Mod Ieħor in which calm comes down like soft snow on the lovers’ tired eyes, everything goes quiet and “I was conscious just of our hearts dancing in our blood”.

There are pieces, like the two poems addressed to a person called Ċali, in which she writes at her most obscure, but by and large the collection can speak, sometimes very eloquently, to all perspicacious readers of Maltese poetry. I recommend it.

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