NAKED AS WATER is a very exotic volume, a translation by Grazio Falzon of the work of Mario Azzopardi, a contemporary Maltese who writes in Maltese, a language which is a rare blend of Arabic and Italian/Sicilian.
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 20th century art and literature. Or is it possible that this meditation on the nature of time is independent of any referencing back to Dali? -----
"Time is flat/
minute hands roll down stunned/
dripping anstractions..."
( "Suite 345" p. 26 )
(HUGH FOX - Small Press Review, Nov. 1996)