Naked As Water - Summary

Summary

Describing himself variously as a Satanic joke, a seven-headed dragon, Franz Kafka's insect, an aura of crazed whiteness and a total eclipse, Mario Azzopardi sees himself "revolving in a Chagall dream, half-moon, half-fish." He broods about himself as "the expansion of hell, fireless, wordless." He brands himself a "guiltless Lucifer," but also an "awful blasphemy."

Azzopardi is l'enfant terriblé of contemporary Maltese poetry. There is no right way for him: he breaks all the rules, makes up new ones and breaks them too. He is fearless in his attempts to mock tradition or to push it to the limits of his passion for life and for words. His poetry is a verbal pyrotechnics sprawling in a phantasmagoria of sounds, images and rhythms.

Because Azzopardi's work is so prolific, varied and at first sight chaotic, the poems in this collection have been arranged into five sections:

• Nocturnes and Visions — poems of angst, nightmares, scenes from the village and city.
• Anima — poems about women.
• The Seven-Headed Dragon — poems about the larger-than-life poet and his quest.
• Equinox — poems on religious themes.
• Tombstone With No Epitaph — abstract poems, poems on geometric relationships, poems about poetry itself.