“Between Seas”, the English edition of Elizabeth Grech’s poetry collection “bejn baħar u baħar” has just been published by Paperwall Publishers, Mumbai, India.
It is also available online in the European Union, in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Published with the support of the Malta National Book Council Translation Fund, “Between Seas” was translated from the Maltese by Irene Mangion. Indian renowned writer and poet Sampurna Chattarji has written a beautiful blurb.
The intricate cover created by graphic designer and visual artist Rosario Di Benedetto, in the framework of a collaboration between the publishing house and Mana Chuma Teatro, one can see flowers growing out of a shell. This is the famous purple Phoenician shell giving life to “Widnet il-Baħar”, an endemic Maltese plant whose name literally means ‘the ear of the sea’: the essence of the Mediterranean enclosed in a single image.
With its colours, its smells and its elements, the Mediterranean is omnipresent in Elizabeth Grech’s poetry, described by Sampurna Chattarji as “featherlight and firefly”.
“Elizabeth Grech’s poems are featherlight and firefly. They are moon and water, star and sky. There is in them such strength that only the elemental can contain. She marks the brutal moments of separation with such candour and delicacy, I marvel at her gift. Love of every hue finds a place here—maternal, filial, fraternal, sensual. Love of her native Malta of blessed seas and sunkissed land; love for lost wildness; never-blind, always-aware that love will break into smithereens, only to be gathered and tested again. Beautifully translated into an English that allows her poems to nestle, shape within shape, sound within sound, a series of small, sensitive unfurlings. Unafraid of evanescence, Grech repairs our mortal hurts. Anyone who has ever loved a child, a woman, a man, a sibling, a parent, a homeland will find in these pages a poet’s tender ministrations.”
Sampurna Chattarji
