Sekwenzi: poeżiji 2017-2022

By Joe Friggieri

Published by Kite Group

I have always admired Joe Friggieri’s poems for their lucidity, admirable musicality and elegant commentary on the life not just poets lead, but also many others like me who so often stop to ponder on the life they are living and where it is inevitably leading them.

The poems in the present collection, all written in his early seventies, might be the last he will publish in book form.

It is a substantial collection, and the fact that it is enriched (unusually for Friggieri) with a critical essay by Mark Vella, and a number of quotations from reviewers of his earlier volumes of verse plus a quotation of an extract from an essay by Friggieri’s greatly admired guru and friend, the late Peter Serracino Inglott, may indicate that the book is a formal and quite handsome nunc dimittis to his poetic career. 

The last two poems here also hint he may think it is time for him to stop. In Karovana, his fellow members in a caravan (of poets?) continue their journey, whereas he says sand got in his eyes, leaving him imprisoned in the cage of time (“magħluq fil-ħabs taż-żmien”).

In turn, the extraordinary last poem Kliemi contrasts the words that leap from him as he writes with those other words – presumably the new vocabulary he would love to use but remains imprisoned within him – another use of the prison metaphor.

COVID has caused all of us for a time to curtail or completely suspend some normal activities. One good result of this was for some to relish and feel serene in times and in places where peace and quiet reign. A good number of pieces show Friggieri writing gratefully of these experiences.

His poem on the isle of Filfla and again his piece on Wied il-Lunzjata, the beautiful valley in Gozo, see him enchanted by these places of quiet and serenity to which he can abandon himself. 

There are times when he fancies that the quiet he is experiencing is “il-ħemda tal-ħolqien”. This is a reflection of the silence that reigns in space, as in Man-Noti tal-Kitarra, a short poem in which he expresses his and perhaps many others’ being drawn into this silence by the sound of a guitar being played.

In Talb Ieħor, he contrasts those who enter a chapel to pray verbally with others, like himself presumably, who silently immerse themselves in the sight of clouds and the perfume of herbs, “u jsiru biċċa mill-ħolqien fis-skiet” (becoming a silent element of the universe).

A contemporary poet who uses structures and techniques of the older poets

I must be one of many readers who will enjoy Friggieri’s use of rhyme in many of his present pieces. His love of musicality in his verse makes him enjoy the way rhyme helps him achieve this. 

He is a contemporary poet who uses, when necessary, the structures and techniques of the older poets. He is clearly a great admirer of Rużar Briffa (also a great favourite of mine) who managed to write great poetry while keeping free from Dun Karm, then at his peak, and dedicates a piece to him.

The poet Joe Friggieri.

Dun Karm himself has a poem dedicated to him, consisting surprisingly mostly of words and phrases from his great sonnet Wied Qirda, the title also used by Friggieri, with his last verse by Dun Karm being the famous “u nħoss għaddejja l-mewt minn fuq Wied Qirda”, the theme of mortality being an important one in Friggieri’s new collection. 

Friggieri is telling the old poet that though he himself was never one of the Dun Karmian school, he acknowledges the old poet’s great achievement.

Other poems show Friggieri acknowledging the influence of other writers, including the great composer Chopin and the dramatist Anton Chekhov, some of whose plays Friggieri, who was also one of the leading stage directors of the late 20th century, he directed, one of them, Ziju Vanja, in which I had the privilege of playing the title role. 

In this poem, he makes the perceptive remark that Chekhov’s characters “jimlew il-ħin/bil-kliem” (fill the time with what they say), and it is exactly this that makes Chekhov’s characters fascinatingly vivid to us.

The old poet has in the past written memorably about love, and now he can only ponder about it as it was. In one of the best pieces in this collection, Il-Kelma tal-Imħabba, he says that times and people will change, but not so the words of love, except that eventually in a person’s life, a spider will spin his web around them. 

In two poems inspired by female characters from The Odyssey, Calypso and Nausicaa, both of them in love with the extraordinary Odysseus, and both deserted by him, the poet pities them and, through them, all women who have been betrayed by men.

Another iconic character from world literature on whom Friggieri writes is Don Quixote. not the only character who has tilted at windmills. Like him, many of us have been allied with ineffectual people like Quixote’s groom Sancho Panza and like him, so many have failed to bring down the political and economic tyrants from whom we suffer.  This is Friggieri at his ironic best.

This is a collection that needs to be explored for the breadth of its topics, for the ever-enchanting melodiousness of the many poems it includes, for the nuanced and ever-civilised expression of feeling and thought.

Sekwenzi is a volume I feel I can recommend even to readers who rarely buy books of poems; many of them would gobble it up. Friggieri, many others, like me, will be grateful to you for it.