fid-dar ta' clara

(at clara's)

In 1998 Immanuel Mifsud published his first collection of poetry - Fid-Dar ta' Clara: 46 poems written over the period of eleven years. Themes vary from reflections on the Maltese political and social situations in the nineties, to the Gulf War of 1991, to the urgent need to escape the strict boundaries of a tiny homeland. Fid-Dar ta' Clara invites the reader to enter "the damp and dark corridors" of this house, which obviously is a metaphor for the writer's persona.
The early short poems (sometimes only two or three lines long), written when the writer was only a teenager, impart an anarchic spirit of an angry young man who expresses disgust in an almost solemn way. This spirit encapsulates also the travel poems, with poetical reflections on London and Budapest in particular. The love poems reveal a bohemian spirit. Love is ephemeral, sometimes dangerous, and always bound to finish in not so happy an ending.
"Poezija lil Clara", one of the main poems in this collection was publised by Oliver Friggieri in his Il-Ktieb tal-Poezija Maltija (The Book of Maltese Poems) (1995),an anthology of poems ranging from the earliest Maltese poetical writings to those written by young writers in the nineties.

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