Naked as Water

Naked as Water, by Mario Azzopardi, is a book of poems written originally in Maltese. Note that Mario Azzopardi (born 1944) should not be confused with Mario Philip Azzopardi (who has made a career in film-making in Canada). The former Azzopardi is a poet, short story writer, university lecturer and cultural columnist and is the incumbent principal of the Malta Drama Centre (visit www.maltadramacentre.org). He made his first mark as a leading, radical poet in the nineteen-sixties. Naked as Water is a collection of verse by Mario Azzopardi, translated by Professor Grazio Falzon. To know more about Mario Azzopardi the poet one can visit his website: www.marioazzopardi.com

Synopsis

Collected poems of an avant-garde author tormented by the search for love, self and God. A phantasmagoria of nocturnal visions, mythic quest and sexual obsession.

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.

Reviews

"... Azzopardi's poems speak forcefully about Malta's history and independence as a culture."^[1]

"In Malta the catchphrase associated with Mario Azzopardi -- poet, teacher of literature and drama producer -- is enfant terrible."^[2]

"Naked As Water is a very exotic volume... The poems themselves are a studied primitivism filled with the primal reality of sea, sun and moon, but always with a sophisticated awareness of the 'isms' of twentieth-century art and literature. This is a very valuable book out of one last minority world of Europe that demands its place on the literary map." ^[3]

Editions

• Translated from the Maltese, and with an Introduction and Afteword by Grazio Falzon; illustrations by Thomas M. Cassidy. Grand Terrace, CA: Xenos Books. ISBN 1-879378-11-6 (paper), xiii + 178 p.

References

1. ^ Kenneth Scambray in L'Italo Americano (Nov. 1998)
2. ^ World Literature Today (Winter 1997)
3. ^ Small Press Review (Nov. 1996)