The intrepid work of late style

I have fond memories of my first meeting with Achille Mizzi at the Grandmaster's Palace in 1997. Back then, we had just created our own literature club at the Junior College, and together with our readings of Neruda, Elouard, Borges, Rimbaud and Garcia Lorca, Mr Mizzi was all the rage. Threadbare copies of L-Għar ta' l-Enimmi and Il-Kantiku tad-Demm, two of his earlier collections, made regular rounds. We were budding writers seeking a Maltese poetic model that could hold its own against other canons we read into. We yearned for a robust poetic oeuvre that could restore our faith in a local poetic. Mr Mizzi was our answer.

It was with avid interest, therefore, that I pored over Eklissi Perpetwi (Everlasting Eclipse), Mr Mizzi's latest collection and his seventh volume of verse, with an insightful introduction by Prof. Oliver Friggieri. One has to keep an important factor in mind when reading Mr Mizzi within the context of a Maltese literary tradition. When Mr Mizzi was producing what eventually became his first book, the 1967 L-Għar ta' l-Enimmi, he was working within a poetic anxiety very different from what Harold Bloom defines as the "anxiety of influence". By that, Bloom meant contemporary poets' ordeal of making their own elbow space within a tradition handed over to them as an excess of greatness. Mr Mizzi's anxiety emerged from a diametrically opposed order: he had to write in the humble knowledge that the local tradition he inherited left him with aeons of literary mileage to cover.

As with his other collections, therefore, Eklissi Perpetwi teems with the classical intertexts and motifs of continental poetry that Mr Mizzi drew upon in order to establish a poetic work that could stand on its own. Indeed, I believe Mr Mizzi's work should be read in this broader context rather than the restricted tropes of the local tradition. Stamboul is an imagistic work that, in its combination of sensorial and emotive experience, evokes the experiential state of the eponymous Turkish city, that of a historic and contemporary hub of eastern and western civilisations.

"Meta għad-dell tal-moskea kaħla bl-iżmalttal-kobalt [...] wara l-koppli ta' ġnien is-Sultan,waqt li ħemduġo ruhi l-għasafaru libtu dikment.Għafsitni għommti. Bħal għonq li jidjieq ħanqitni," Mr Mizzi writes. It is the trademark trope of a stately bard; a poem reminiscent of W.B. Yeats and his great Byzantium poems: "Marbles of the dancing floorbreak bitter furies of complexity,fresh images that yet fresh images begetthat dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea", writes the self-styled "Last of the Romantics".

And indeed, Mr Mizzi's poetry here performs a calculated break, away from the usage of archetypal motifs typical of classical European writing. He is a poet of forms and images, a lyricist of profound respect for the eternal thematics that furnish his contemplations in turn with novel uncertainties and iterative sources of angst.

Mr Mizzi's writing refreshingly harbours a different order of anxiety from the one that informed his endeavour 40 years ago. More than any of the preceding collections, this volume entertains an element of what Edward W. Said, in an evocative excursus on the Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, Visconti's adaptation of Il Gattopardo and Mozart's Cosè Fan Tutte among others, has termed "Late Style". Poems such as L-Arka ta' Noe, Gerit and Amnesija exhibit a sense of disruption of structural and thematic order that Mr Said suggests is an "artistic lateness" that involves a nonserene tension, works that tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure, leaving the reader more unsettled than before.

Mr Said defines late style as a moment when an artist fully in command of his medium nevertheless abandons communication with the established social order of which he is a part and achieves a contradictory, alienated relationship to it. Late work, therefore, constitutes a form of narrative or poetic or expressive exile. In the final verses of L-Arka ta' Noe, a poetic testimony of acquaintance with politicians, noblemen and churchmen, Mr Mizzi writes "Imma eqreb lejn Alla m'hemm ħadd fost dawn kollha [...] daqs il-ħlejjaq ta' demm biered li ġo l-ilma jżiġġu f'dimensjoni għariba għal min twieled minn żaqq ommu."

This haunting volta in Mr Mizzi's poem produces a haunting image of nature that is estranged from established human order. As a poetic gesture it implicates the persona within a milieu that is not of a mere fantastic or prophetic nature but is, indeed, radically estranged from the semanticity of convention itself.

The element of "lateness" emerges strongly in Amnesija, where the poet flirts with the notion of the end through the natural process itself even as he knows that this process will continue eternally.

This should be a basic criterion when gauging the achievement of Mr Mizzi's latest work. Eklissi Perpetwi is, as its title promises, an informed, thorough poetic questioning of the universal, the cosmic and the eternal. It is a ripened poet's intrepid take on the great elements that circumscribe human existence, in the knowledge that an effective poetry will always require the bold contemplation of their alternatives.

• Mr Bugeja is a doctoral researcher and Commonwealth scholar in the Department of English and Contemporary Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.

• The review copy of this title is the reviewer's own.