<p>Immanuel Mifsud is one of Malta&#39;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.</p><p>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 &#39;play of waves&#39;, the excitement and anguish of being alive, the inexorability of old age, the unremitting darkness of what lies ahead. Mifsud&#39;s language is direct and unadorned, yet the images he creates are unsettling and deeply affecting.</p><p>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.</p>