The Play of Waves

Immanuel Mifsud is one of Malta's most influential writers, and this, his second collection in English translation by the poet Maurice Riordan, confirms his standing internationally as a poet of distinction. Lyrical, melancholy, passionate, his poetry is highly impressionistic, full of fleeting moments which reflect the immutability of the natural world with its seasons and its 'play of waves', the excitement and anguish of being alive, the inexorability of old age, the unremitting darkness of what lies ahead. Mifsud's language is direct and unadorned, yet the images he creates are unsettling and deeply affecting. Maurice Riordan describes the poet as a "latter-day troubadour, whose gloomy, wayward, excessive poems deserve a wide audience", and this selection of poems with their "plangent music and vibrant textures" in this fine translation will certainly make its mark throughout the English-speaking world.