Drop by drop, but never full

Meta Siket il-Baħar (When the Sea Was Still) is an exploration of poetic identity and the associations of eternity with the written word. In Charles Bezzina's collection of Maltese poetry, the poet struggles with the sea's infinite secrets, at times drowning in a self-reflexive abyss. There is a sense of breathlessness within this work which I feel emanates from a stifled atmosphere of trying, persistently and obstinately, to recapture the long lost Romantic spirit of the 18th century.

Mr Bezzina's poems reminisce a quieter, more meditative past as the poet captures the essence of our rural landscape, or what's left of it. It is perhaps with nostalgic enthusiasm that I say that his presentations of rural livelihood struck me deep, not in their philosophical profoundness, but in their simplicity. Mr Bezzina's poetry is endowed with a rare touch of naïvety that is such a scarce quality in Maltese writing. At times, our language loses itself in the complexity of arcane words and rigid syntax. Mr Bezzina's linguistic fluidity and his sincerity of spirit is the most redeeming factor in this collection. It is as though as a reader, you are a lone wanderer on top of the quiet waves of nostalgia, conversing with distant winds and listening to your own solitary cry. It is, after all, a Romantic cry.

Mr Bezzina's lamentations ring through the whole collection like distant echoes that reverberate through an anonymous and timeless void. It is here that the writing self is lost entirely. Moreover, the poet presents us with a dualistic view of both within and outside his Ivory tower, yearning to be lost after a good meal of lotus flowers. This very stillness drives his desire to write, and marks the central thematic preoccupations of his collection.

The English Romantic Movement is clearly a very strong influence on Mr Bezzina. Perhaps too strong.

It is absolutely fascinating how a member of the Akkademja tal-Malti has the audacity to write a poem that is almost a carbon copy of William Blake's O Rose Thou Art Sick. I found this in bad taste, and it thwarted my conception of Mr Bezzina's innocent and truthful voice.

If John Keats tells us that Mammon is the artists' god, Mr Bezzina adds a bit of Jesus to the equation. He (Mr Bezzina's Jesus) is omni-ferociously present in almost every poem. This Jesus, however, is not the New Testament type but more of a Big-Brother-God whose eyes are persistently harassing the poet: "Għajnejk f'kull pass li nagħmel jiġru miegħi" (With every step that I take, your eyes surround me). There is also a strong fear of Hell, especially of the Dantesque kind. Mr Bezzina writes in Meta Qrajt Dwar L-Infern (After having read about Hell) that he wants to hide Dante's Inferno, from himself and from any other person, to avoid instilling the fear from the horrid scenes there depicted. Not quite the thing to do if you're aspiring to be a literary figure. In case we ever forget who Dante was, well, you know who to blame.

Mr Bezzina's writing is at times musty, purging all that is natural. This is rather contradictory to the epigraph that Mr Bezzina chooses for his collection. He quotes John Keats's 1818 letter to John Taylor on poetry and axioms. John Keats believed that: "If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all".

Mr Bezzina's poetry falls short of singularity, rarely achieving surprise due to its nagging and repetitive quality. The poet should have had a serious editor for this collection and I believe the end result would have been far more superior. There are a few poems worth reading, but as a collection, the poems seem to me like kamikaze waves, lapping the banks of an insular and artificial lake.

• Mr Galea studied English at Master's level, and wrote his thesis on the interaction of Food, Memory and Literature. He is a freelance writer and is currently working on his first novel.

• A review copy of this title was supplied by the author.