The dialogue between author and artist has always been a fascinating one, particularly when grouped within a stated theme. The book Journey, recently published by Horizons, is one such example. It is the latest, and certainly the most ambitious, in a number of collaborations between Victor Fenech and Luciano Micallef which go back to the late 1970s with the publication of the iconic poetry book F’Altamira.

Dreamloss

Journey contains 40 page spreads in full colour, in which Fenech’s writings and Micallef’s artworks dovetail into each other, creating an artistic panorama that encapsulates a variety of themes. These themes include history, love, politics, and ‘conversations’ with internationally renowned authors like Rumi, Lorca, Pessoa and Sylvia Plath. In addition one finds a number of travel prose pieces and meditations on life and the hereafter.

The book was entirely designed by Luciano Micallef and a lot of attention to detail was given. One specific feature is the way the text in various pages sways in a breeze or moves away over a train or slides into the depths. The intention was to create a dialogue between image and text to emphasise the engagement between the two.

The intention was to create a dialogue between image and text to emphasise the engagement between the two

In his foreword, David E. Cooper, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Durham University, writes: “What Victor’s poems and prose vignettes articulate is complemented by Luciano’s artworks: the nostalgia, disillusion, erotic charge, and sense of mystery... It would be misleading to call the artworks ‘illustrations’ of what is written. This would suggest that the two can be considered in isolation, and would therefore ignore the intimacy – the ‘dialectic’ – between the images and the words.”

Tigné 2

Indeed, some of Micallef’s more panoramic panels, like Fertility Goddess, On Dingli Cliffs and Marsaxlokk, together with their adjacent poem, can be taken as homage to our ancestors and to their struggle to preserve this beautiful land of ours. One such example is the poem Ħaġar Qim: “These stones carry me back / to my fathers and mothers / and brothers and sisters. / These stones are my DNA.” In dire contrast one sees the cold towers of New Millenium, with Fenech’s cri de coeur: “When my time comes / I will not feel sad to take my leave / of this glass and concrete shanty / shorn of green / without soil / and without soul.”

On another plane, Fenech’s love poems, like Your Eyes, Lovesong Fifty and Dreamloss, are given such fascinating treatment by Micallef that they can be truly termed a labour of love between two very dedicated artists of pen and brush – a life journey of two creative souls.

Haġar Qim