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Once I Forget
Poems
Co-publisher:Horizons (Malta)
Categories: International, Poetry
“Once I Forget,” a collection of poems by John P. Portelli, originally written in Maltese and translated by Aaron Aquilina and John Martin. These sections include the title page, a preface by Professor Norbert Bugeja, and portions of the poems themselves, which explore themes of memory, exile, loss, and the poet’s childhood village, Ħad-Dingli. The preface highlights Portelli’s struggle with forgetfulness and his focus on the vanishing past, connecting his work to literary figures like Yeats and Walcott. Furthermore, the source provides biographical notes on the author, translators, and cover artist, Carmel Micallef, along with endorsements that praise the poetry’s transcendence of the lyric and its powerful exploration of nostalgia and the impossibility of return.
Translated from the Maltese by Aaron Aquilina and John Martin.
John P. Portelli treads along those nebulous cliff-edges where forgetfulness attempts to pick at the treacherous scabs of recall, capturing the vertigo of a distant childhood as it inches outward
into the land’s end of metaphor. — Prof. Norbert Bugeja
Portelli’s gorgeous poems speak of exile, searching, and loss in such a way that the reader becomes one with the village of his birth, the cliffs, the smells, his frail body, and the sea. —Jennifer Hosein, Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal-born writer, visual artist and educator, author A Map of Rain Days
..the poems of Once I Forget restore our faith in the transcendence of the lyric, in the power of song and secular psalm. — Karen Shenfeld, Canadian writer and film-maker,
author The Law of Return
ISBN Print: 978-1-997742-16-6
Publication Date: November 2025
Page Count: 76
Binding Type: Soft Cover
Trim Size: 6x9
Language: English
Colour: B&W
| Book Format | Print Book, PDF |
|---|
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