Eight Sixes (published by Kotba Calleja, 2025) is a collection of poems written over a 10-year period in the author’s ‘middle years’. Often reflecting, almost from a distance, on mundane occurrences or travel experiences, it confronts the speed, contradictions and griefs of contemporary life. It grapples with issues of self in the personal and in the broader societal perspective, balancing the tensions of the mundane, with eloquent, measured language to seek out ‘truth’ and joy.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction, Disrupted Realities – Poetry and the Politics of Truth, The Poetics of Care – Intimacy, Tenderness, Repair.
Author
Jacques Borg Barthet
Jacques Borg Barthet was born in Malta in 1975. He is a Partner at architecture and design firm AP Valletta and a visiting lecturer in the Faculty for the Built Environment at the University of Malta. A regular contributor to the Maltese poetry scene, his first poetry collection 'Eight Sixes' was published by Kotba Calleja in November 2025. The work seeks out joy and 'truth' in the busyness and the cacophony of the mundane.
