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Daniel Massa:
Barefoot in the saltpans: poetry Mediterranean
Allied Publications, 2015.
8. 134pp.

Towards the end of his career as an academic and a creative author, Daniel Massa gives us in this volume of verse a reminder of his high worth as a poet.

Massa first came to my notice and to that of other poetry lovers in Malta in 1966 in the Kwartett anthology and continued to establish himself in the 1970 volume Analiżi ’70 but it was perhaps in 1989 with Xibkatuliss, a collection of his 1965-1989 poetry that the fullness of his achievement was made clear to all.

Five years before Xibkatuliss, Massa had already shown in Limestone 84 how skilfully he could handle English verse, producing fine English versions of several of his Maltese poems, such as the greatly admired Delimara or Il-Bajja ta’ San Tumas or Disinn għal Arazzi Ġodda.

In the present volume, Massa has collected many, or perhaps most, of his English verse – whether his own, sometimes greatly-reworked versions of poems originally written in Maltese, or poems he wrote originally in English. I would have liked to know which poem belongs to which of these two groups and to have some indication when these, or their originals, were published.

Only a small section of Juvenilia and a few poems clearly written in recent years, such as his somewhat self-satisfied verses on his recent biography of Peter Serracino Inglott, give a good idea of when they were written.

This collection should introduce a new reader of Massa’s verse to his ability to create poetic structures in which rich imagery, derived from nature, the sea especially or from classical sources – Greek mythology, Greek and Roman literature – emerges from or creates a narrative, more often hinted than clearly stated. Massa himself, and his beloved, themselves often become creatures the reader can view as akin to those of myth. The complexity of the pieces in which narrative and poetic comment are twined together led author Jim Crace, who has written a short (but very perceptive) foreword to the book give this advice to the reader:

First read the poem aloud to get its melody, then read again to seek narrative and themes, then read again and again ‘to lure out its complexities’.

Rich imagery creates a narrative, more often hinted than clearly stated

It is good advice, but it is also a warning to the common, more or less superficial, reader of verse, to stay away. The more serious reader, however, would do well to follow Crace’s advice.

Crace echoes what Peter Serracino Inglott wrote in his introduction to Limestone 84, that within the Maltese author’s written English, a learned language, the native language detonates.

“Within what the words say, a different music is inbuilt.” In Crace’s words. Massa’s skilfully-written English verse does not stifle “the cadence and percussion of his home language”.

While a good many of the poems reflect the author’s ecstasy when he succumbs to the strange allure of the sea or other natural phenomena, or when he seeks to express key moments of his relation with the woman he loves, there are important works in which he comments with lyrical intensity on his disappointment with once-admired politicians (Before Commitment or, better still, Design for a New Arras) or the cruelty his beloved sea can inflict on humans, as in Midnight Swim, where he comments in tragic mode on the luzzu disaster that took place in the Gozo channel in 1948.

In my favourite poem, Delimara Bay (which I still prefer in its original Maltese form) Massa magically shows us why the sea has such a strong influence on him, writing of his underwater diving, “I have been here before.../before time shut the windows of my sense/stilled the birth-pangs of my race/under the shade of the drift-nets curling; I slept/centuries ago cradled in matrix of coral/in spiralling stalactites...” It is a poem that, if once read, will never yield its allure.

The imagery and the word-music of the volume are enriched by the photos taken by the author’s son, Nathaniel Massa, some of which (such as the picture on the book cover) have a subtle beauty.