Abigail ArdelleZammit
Biography
Abigail Zammit is a poet who is fascinated by what lies outside the solipsistic self. Her writing engages with the raw power of place and the female body’s search for meaning within the vast topography that confronts it. Political consciousness, feminist poetics and ecopoetics inform her poetry and hybrid work, with metre and form playing an increasingly complex role in order to comment on themes as diverse as mortality, representation, and the interplay between music and silence. She has found inspiration in Carolyn Forché, Jo Shapcott, Jorie Graham, Hélène Cixous and Roland Barthes.
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Zammit was born in Attard in 1976. She holds Master’s degrees in English and in Creative Writing, as well as a PhD in Creative Writing. Zammit is a Senior Lecturer at the G.F. Abela Junior College. She was the first to teach creative writing within the English Department of the University of Malta, where she ran workshops for ten years. Zammit’s work has been featured in numerous international journals and anthologies including Matter, Modern Poetry in Translation, Mslexia, Poetry International, The SHOp, Iota,O: JA&L, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology 2022, Smokestack Lightning, The Shop – An Anthology of Poetry, Grand Tour – Reise durch die junge Lyrik Europas.
Zammit’s political engagement is evident in Voices from the Land of Trees (2007), which speaks about the thirty-six years of civil war in Guatemala. Here, a Bakhtinian polyphony of voices allows for multifaceted truths to emerge, while remaining sensitive to the politics of representation. In Portrait of a Woman with Sea Urchin (2015), these techniques are developed further, with Zammit having interviewed Maltese survivors of WWII so as to allow their subjective narratives to inspire one of the collection’s longer sequences. In the fertility goddess section – ‘You May Touch If You Like’– the Maltese Venus is a dramatic persona who speaks in bold, confident tones, undermining patriarchal worldviews and Cartesian dichotomies, so as to allow for permeability and otherness.
Zammit’s latest work, Leaves Borrowed from Human Flesh, is more experimental in form and style. Here, the lyrical, the political and the spiritual are subtly but inextricably intertwined. Zammit’s search for meaning and empowerment is constant and ultimately regenerative, but it never comes from unequivocal answers. If there are any epiphanies, they must emerge from a perpetual re-evaluation of genre, language and form.
Biography written by Ruth Bezzina
