Time… and Time Again
by Charles Flores,
published by Horizons, 2023
I believe that poets, as artists, tend to rotate their innermost thoughts time and time again. In his testimonial compilation of verses of the past five decades, Charles Flores tends to revisit his early themes while spattering new sombre colours oozing from an often “gaudy imagination”. He seems to have extended his fondness of ostentatious hues that poet-critic Mario Azzopardi way back in 1969 in l-Orizzont described as “dazzling”.
Azzopardi was reviewing an anthology of first poems appropriately entitled Kalejdoskopju written by three budding boomer generation lyricists, namely Flores, the late Pawlu Cachia and myself. In fact, Azzopardi then judged the young Flores as being “obsessed with psychedelic dazzling lights crying out uncompromisingly against a sour world”.
The matured poet that is Flores today speaks through his latest collection Time… and Time Again wherein he includes freshly-composed poetry that appears to connect with, or rather resurrect notions that had mused him when he was still in his 1970s youth.
The poet’s net is sprinkled with a corpus of “distasteful” adjectives and nouns from which he derives compromising pleasure as he enjoys what often irks him in his fanciful yet harsh innermost scrutiny. Not unlike the Biblical serpent in Eden he loves to tempt readers of his well-designed verses to fall into several bizarre desires from which springs diabolical pleasure of contrasting ambiguities, an experience similar to “the shrub (that) is green with envy”.
The poet’s biographical context and bibliographic material guides the reader to a better understanding of the genre of the text. I want to believe that reviewing the spirit that lies behind the lines grafted into glittering poems by an old comrade and media colleague offers advantages when it comes to mediating creative outbursts of seemingly negative tirades in the shape of puzzled interrogations.
As have-been teenagers in the late 1960s, Flores and I were both seeking a way of letting off steam about ideals and disappointments, perhaps influenced by the flower power stimuli beaming from the likes of Bob Dylan in the starred and striped land of the impossible.
Optimism versus cynicism
In those days our poetical beads of fancy contrasted between optimism and cynicism, each responding to our respective childhood vinegary experiences, as Flores explains in There are times. On an equally intimate overture the poet seems obsessed with You of the laughing eyes: “where have all the memories gone?... Why does the song of yesteryear sound so strange and yet so grippingly haunting?” the singer asks.
In Clickety-clack, the bard insists on “your laughing eyes” that are now supposedly “cloudy”. Do these “laughing eyes” belong to, alas, furrowed pastures? The poet could not help but pity his own Party with “a dishful of pollution”, maybe because he is used to be determined in his belief that “no ship of hope can sail into our harbours” (Look, Love).
In one of my 1960s calligrams in the shape of a coffin published in Kalejdoskopju I had alluded to such Flores’ tickling ‘pessimism’ with lines such as: imqar għamilt bħal sħabi li l-ikreħ rawh sabiħ! (Pessimismu, il-Poeti Pessimisti Żgħażagħ), 1969: (If only I could mimic my friends in seeing beauty in what is not).
When compared with his yesterday’s poems (the undated poetry in Time… and Time Again are recent compositions), the poet appears to have sustained his sarcasm but adorned it with a coat of more alluring inventiveness, inquisitiveness now projecting a silver lining on his heavy clouds, consequentially startling us when it hardens into realistic veracities.
Charles Flores tends to revisit his early themes while spattering new sombre colours oozing from an often 'gaudy imagination'
While reading Flores I compiled ubiquitous lexical terms such as “foggy”, “misty” and “filthy” when climaxing into romance “under these sheets”, though bemoaning tomorrow’s “weariness” (Look, Love).
Likewise, “crisis” and “shadows” led to a “mousetrap” of “pollution” in “a satanic dance” of “cold fires” played to an “audience of perversion” whipped by “bleeding daggers”. A “hell of thoughts and memories” of 1974 was revisited with equal vigour in the not-so-distant Hell is still there to “the howling of the animals” and “the squeals of frigid mice”.
The old classical poetry was produced when the world did not have the internet and search engines, and therefore learning lines by heart needed traditional rhymes and rhythm.
Today’s poetic characteristics, while still meant to be read aloud, necessitate ingenious use of language, insinuations and enthusiasm to create alternative tempos and idioms. Without structures and no set of rules, free verse is the commonest form of contemporary lyrics. Thus, fitting his liberal style, Flores fully exploits this autonomy time and time again and frequently experiments with conceding unexpected mocking wonders.
The collection of poetry is a load of tribulations full of exhilarating cross-examinations. Photo: Shutterstock.comBritish colonial influence
Flores in his Forword hints at his British colonial cultural influence during his childhood in Kalkara. However, the poet could not help absorb the discerning “golden skies and bluish seas” of the Mediterranean and cry over the shrinking of “the crystal seas”.
When in Mad Med Man one expects a homily over the current climate change the poet introverts his aqueous stimulation unto himself: “You are my man. Mad Med Man. You are me”, but then one realises it was written in 1974! This merciless approach is vindicated in the short poem on the opposite page, Pick my teeth, when he turns De Sade into a metaphor and tries to excel him by “kindly” inviting “my love” to “grimace” at his unethical gesture.
Flores loves enjambment of lines. His 20th Lament in 1975 is rolled out in two sentences while mirroring his 27-year-old life as a “history book, untouched, unknown, the greatest dish for the bookworms”.
His oyster-God receives the same treatment, admitting though that he could be a “radical”… a “revolutionary” cynically confused at the end with alphabet letters on the ground forming the pertinent word ‘good’. He further insists that both his brain and his soul “are sadly lost in the feverish despair of what could be, but hasn’t been”, rounding it off with a rare hopeful question: “Is it too late now?”, perhaps naively uncovering what really lies in The In-Between of his doubting often angry mind.
Persisting forgotten past
In his recent, rather longer, creations, Flores shows more of his distrustful stances, with most poems interrogating unanswered investigations towards the end of most of his penetrating calls. The poet seems to be captivated – if not disturbed – by his persisting “forgotten past”, poignantly, as “this boy seeks the truth” in the universe of his consciousness (Silly Child (This boy)).
A welcome novelty in this thought-provoking anthology is the bibliographic aspect wherein Flores illustrates in retro style the provenance of a number of lines in English he had contributed to several publications and included in personal anthologies (A Voice from Kalkara, 1973, Correspondences, 1973, and Laughing Eyes, 1986) in English, including the international monthly Poet (1968), guest edited by Victor Fenech, Phoenix Broadsheet No. 22 (UK, 1972), Crosswords (UK, 1980) compiled by Oliver Friggieri and Jewels of the Imagination (The International Library of Poetry, 1997).
Flores’ realm of poetic motivation is not limited to his emotional intelligence and his immediate environment. As a journalist he could not miss out on commenting on the Berlin Wall (Ball Games), anti-Nuke protests (Marshmallow Mountains), the war in Ukraine (The tyrant and the clown) as well as the Turkish and Moroccan earthquakes (Melodyless) and the Arab-Israeli conflict (Memories).
The book has a short but absorbing introduction by Prof. Daniel Massa, a poet, teacher and scholar of great distinction.
Overall, Flores in this Time… and Time Again collection – a load of tribulations full of exhilarating cross-examinations wrapped in pleasant-sounding tinctures – offers readers an invigorating challenge to the mind and its literary taste buds. Fatigued as we are with the daily proclivity to stressful inertia, this whirlwind of notions and pensive labyrinths will, I am sure, tempt us to discover in anguish the archetypical image of the human soul, a place for growth of the inner self, perhaps “opening our eyes to good and evil”, to wild meandering and visitations to ports of intrigue. Worth digesting.