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Mario Azzopardi: Epistoli mid-Deżert: Poeżiji u Poesaġġi. Horizons, 2014. 212 pp.

Mario Azzopardi was brought up in a very Catholic family and belonged to St Ġorġ Preca’s MUSEUM religious society, but since early manhood he has been an atheist – an atheist, however, who still searches desperately, and in vain, to find God.

This search he has kept up even in this late stage of his life and the present volume of verse and poes-aġġi, sees him creating imagery, using his baroque style to look into his mind and heart and record the battle he is forever fighting.

The substantial volume, introduced at great length by Charles Briffa, is divided into a number of sections.

The author has had a long and highly interesting career in theatre and this has led him, in this volume and in his 2010 volume Skizzi tal-Karnival, to use a variety of fictitious figures to show us aspects of his own personality.

In this new book, however, he shows doubt whether this theatrical device is perfectly valid or just a device to escape his true identity: “I am the absence of I/in a spectral performance/of mental delirium/I’m an artist with a cowardly conscience/ playing around with wigs”.

Azzopardi’s problems with establishing his true identity are at the source of many pieces. This problem he states most strongly (most theatrically?) in the first poem of the book, Il-Bieb taż-Żonqor (The Granite Gate), in which he undertakes a long journey, after a voice behind the gate asks him who he is.

To this he replies “I am I”. But, when he comes back after the journey and is asked the same question by the voice, his answer changes to “I am you”.

Does this mean that the God he is ceaselessly seeking is nothing but a being created by the poet, that the poet’s life has been a continuous struggle to come to terms merely with the idea of god figure in his own soul and mind?

In another section, Il-Mixja lejn xi divinità (Journey towards divinity), containing poems written, I suspect, more recently than the ones I have mentioned, he seems more receptive to the idea of a God who is not just part of his thinking.

Azzopardi’s problems with establishing his true identity are at the source of many pieces

Att tal-Fidi (Act of faith) for instance, is about a faith hidden deep within him that he feels he should explore, while in X’qalli l-leħen interjuri (What my inner voice told me) he is suspicious of this voice’s suggestion to create a space within himself where God can expand.

Perhaps the finest piece in this section is Faustina Kowalska, featuring a believer who uses her relationship with the poet to bring him to God.

But, he says, “the gleam from Christ’s wounded heart/can only reach my blind eyes/eyes carved like a statue’s in my exile”. In these pieces, even if his belief may not have grown stronger, his regret is much deeper.

Azzopardi seems to be anguished by the knowledge that he could have been a writer admired by many readers and not merely by lovers of arcane and elaborately obscure verse, if he had been less obsessed with his existential despair.

In Dak li jidher immedjat (What seems to be facing me next), he describes himself as “a poet who has stopped believing in the verse he wrote/a writer who has no place to flee to/save on a magic carpet”.

Not that this makes him give up writing, for there are still memories that need to be summoned up.

In Kien dera n-narrativa (He had got used to the narrative), we find a desperately sad piece, expressive of his loss of faith in himself as a writer.

He speaks of the little time left him “to mend the dream with a hole at its centre”.

Of his poems in the Poetry of Dissidence section, the one on M.A. Vassalli is particularly fine, a proud poem, sometimes trumpet-toned.

His indignation is great upon considering how the less-than-orthodox Vassalli was treated even when he died: “And when you gave up the ghost, you found no one to give you a decent burial, Vassalli, except for a friendly foreigner.”

His poems written in Australia show his habitual deep feeling for the underdog, the Aborigines in this case, and his scorn for those who have abused them and seen them as inferiors. L-istupru tat-territorju shows him venting his disgust and condemnation as strongly as ever.

The Poesaġġi section includes a strong piece that is clearly his testament as a committed man of the theatre, stating his admiration for Dario Fo, the satirist of Italian institutions, Maxim Gorky (whose The Inner depths Azzopardi has im-pressively directed and designed), Brecht (whose Life of Galileo Azzopardi has also finely directed) and Majakovsky.

The ending of this section, however, brings out the black despair predominant in this book.

The book ends with a deeply felt epilogue by Patricia Gatt, the woman who has been close to Azzopardi during this recent dark period.

She feels that his social care, his great sympathy with the wretched and the underdog, expressed in a number of pieces, particularly in the Australia section, make this book truly memorable.