Les Presses du Réel through its Editions Al Dante aims to publish the most contemporary of works of poetry, poetic and experimental prose, as well as works of the historical avant-garde, theoretical essays and further afield.
Norbert Bugeja's book may be purchased from several bookshops in France or directly acquired online from the Presses du Reél . Reaching out to strengthen the place of Malta’s poetry on the international literary map, Oublie qu'elle n'est pas là invites readers of French on an alluring journey across s anxious spaces of an orphaned memory.
Two decades after the tragic demise of his mother, delves into the fraught silences of time to summon forth the echoes of a conversation that ended abruptly, in the midst of one summer afternoon.
Poetry here returns as a language stolen from the erosion of memory: letters of salt burning in the flesh of remembrance, the ephemeral syllables of a nation that persists on the cliff-edge of disrupted youth, half of an island scratched into the morning sand. He rummages in sequences of rhythm, metaphor, image and synaesthesia to capture the mood of years that never took place, and ones that may never be lived.
What emerges in Oublie qu'elle n'est pas là is an elegy built from the surviving marks of a complex female persona. The poet engages with her voice by letting speak for themselves those places she lived in or passed through — during her life as much as in his reveries. Over a long quest for a distinct poetic style, Bugeja creates a sequence of moments in which forgetting, as much as remembrance, becomes a condition for surviving among the ruins of an interrupted bond.
Prof. Norbert Bugeja is a member of the within the and Director of the at the .
