ElizabethGrech

Consequently, this has led to an eight-year stint working in translation, which in turn has endowed her with insights into the intricacies of language. It has also served as a launchpad to experiment with the flexibility and crispness inherent in the different languages. For Grech, style is fluid and dynamic, as it sways her towards the use of language in unexpected ways.

Through the medium of poetry, she creates pieces that follow the heart’s direction, resisting overthinking. Her intuitions are not forced but rather allow her to capture and define a moment in time. Though it might be ephemeral, that moment belongs to the voice of Elizabeth Grech, but soon transcends the physical space; as time presses on, the poetry transcends the poet, the voice morphs into another persona.

Grech resembles a technician who provides a mould through which the person behind the poem transmutes. She believes that over time, she is not the same person as the one who penned the poems. Despite this personal dissociation between Grech and her work, the poems as text or as events are not fully dislocated from their socio-political contexts. Whereas Grech does not intentionally present her poetry as a form of activism, she affirms that the act of creating can be inherently militant.

Notwithstanding the activist outlook, the subjects that pervade her poetry retain a very personal imprint. Her first poetry collection bejn baħar u baħar (between one sea and another, Merlin Publishers, 2019) epitomises the culmination of two central elements in her works: natural elements and important human connections, not least the loss of her father. One specific figurative element of nature that features in Grech’s work is the moon, which is symbolically connected to fertility and maternity, both of which find a resonance in her work that revolves around conversations with her children – at once tinged with the innocence and simplicity present in the children’s language, but also with a profundity rooted in the limitless imagination of children.

With a full spectrum of appearances, interviews, and projects in poetry and translation, Grech’s works span 20 years of experience, and represent a spiritual journey into herself and her identity as a woman, daughter, mother, wife, and friend. Like the cyclical moon and the ever-changing sea, her works come full circle in poignant ways, following the spontaneous rhythm of life and its many dynamic motions.