Poetry review – ON LOAN: Merryn Williams reviews Caroline Maldonado’s new collection of poems about life in Italy which often shine unaccustomed light on the darker aspects
On Loan,
Caroline Maldonado
Poetry Salzburg
ISBN: 978-3-901993-91-6,
pp.63 price not given
Caroline Maldonado lives part-time in a small village in Central Italy and is a distinguished translator, deeply rooted in a particular landscape and its way of life. It’s a beautiful landscape – olives, apricots, sunflowers and shimmering blue sea. The food and wine are superb. But her poems are haunted by memories of the earthquake that swept through this region in 2016, killing hundreds of people, destroying houses, bridges and motorways and leaving deep cracks in the ground. It was a surprise to people in Western Europe – we thought that earthquakes only happened far away – but we are all treading on a fragile globe that might explode under our feet, and should remember that everything we have got is ‘on loan’.
Maldonado is aware, too, of what is happening in Gaza and the rest of the world. “The Sleeping Lady of Malta c 3600-2500 BC” describes a tiny ancient figure, some sort of goddess, dug up after centuries:
did you foresee
this other small figure, dug
from the ground though not modeled
from clay like you – a child
still alive, her innocent mouth
stuffed with rubble?’
much like the Italian children caught up in the earthquake, In “Even here you can’t escape the war”, a Ukrainian woman is working in Italy as a carer. But she has family in the war zone and keeps checking her phone for news, actually seeing the lights as shells explode.
Humanity is interlinked. People emigrate to and from Italy. The animal world, too, is not entirely different from our own. In an impressive poem, “Shelduck”, a mother duck guides ‘her young into the sea/ towards the haven of an estuary’. Birds can’t count their young, it is thought, and that is just as well, because only a few ducklings survive the crossing. The parallels with human refugees are inescapable.
The best poems, including those I have quoted, are in the third section, ‘Non-finito’. Some of them, like “The untold story of the Italian tomato”, are about guest workers. The tomatoes taste gorgeous, but those who pick them are treated with contempt and often die prematurely. “Days of Thirst” reminds us, with great power, of an Italy which tourists hardly see:
These days the sun’s fierce,
all records broken. Figs
discharge their sweetness.
The heart of them drunk
with hornets. Shrivelled grapes
hang like dark ribbons.
Days of thirst, for the cool
relief of watermelons
in La Pontina where tourists
seek secluded beaches
and Indian workers lift
weighty globes under the sun.
Some die in the fields, some
on the road, others
on a mattress in a shack.
After 30 years of labour
Kamal picked up his last
watermelon and fell.
With no family here
who knows where
to send his body home.
There is also a strong group of poems set in a hospital, and another, “In 1490 the white-robed angels”, which appears to be set in Savonarola’s time, but is actually a contemporary one about the Taliban’s purity police. All of these are good and, as mentioned already, the ‘Non-finito’ section really remarkable. Caroline Maldonado is a poet not to be missed.
Nov 5 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Caroline Maldonado
Poetry review – ON LOAN: Merryn Williams reviews Caroline Maldonado’s new collection of poems about life in Italy which often shine unaccustomed light on the darker aspects
On Loan,
Caroline Maldonado
Poetry Salzburg
ISBN: 978-3-901993-91-6,
pp.63 price not given
Caroline Maldonado lives part-time in a small village in Central Italy and is a distinguished translator, deeply rooted in a particular landscape and its way of life. It’s a beautiful landscape – olives, apricots, sunflowers and shimmering blue sea. The food and wine are superb. But her poems are haunted by memories of the earthquake that swept through this region in 2016, killing hundreds of people, destroying houses, bridges and motorways and leaving deep cracks in the ground. It was a surprise to people in Western Europe – we thought that earthquakes only happened far away – but we are all treading on a fragile globe that might explode under our feet, and should remember that everything we have got is ‘on loan’.
Maldonado is aware, too, of what is happening in Gaza and the rest of the world. “The Sleeping Lady of Malta c 3600-2500 BC” describes a tiny ancient figure, some sort of goddess, dug up after centuries:
did you foresee
this other small figure, dug
from the ground though not modeled
from clay like you – a child
still alive, her innocent mouth
stuffed with rubble?’
much like the Italian children caught up in the earthquake, In “Even here you can’t escape the war”, a Ukrainian woman is working in Italy as a carer. But she has family in the war zone and keeps checking her phone for news, actually seeing the lights as shells explode.
Humanity is interlinked. People emigrate to and from Italy. The animal world, too, is not entirely different from our own. In an impressive poem, “Shelduck”, a mother duck guides ‘her young into the sea/ towards the haven of an estuary’. Birds can’t count their young, it is thought, and that is just as well, because only a few ducklings survive the crossing. The parallels with human refugees are inescapable.
The best poems, including those I have quoted, are in the third section, ‘Non-finito’. Some of them, like “The untold story of the Italian tomato”, are about guest workers. The tomatoes taste gorgeous, but those who pick them are treated with contempt and often die prematurely. “Days of Thirst” reminds us, with great power, of an Italy which tourists hardly see:
These days the sun’s fierce,
all records broken. Figs
discharge their sweetness.
The heart of them drunk
with hornets. Shrivelled grapes
hang like dark ribbons.
Days of thirst, for the cool
relief of watermelons
in La Pontina where tourists
seek secluded beaches
and Indian workers lift
weighty globes under the sun.
Some die in the fields, some
on the road, others
on a mattress in a shack.
After 30 years of labour
Kamal picked up his last
watermelon and fell.
With no family here
who knows where
to send his body home.
There is also a strong group of poems set in a hospital, and another, “In 1490 the white-robed angels”, which appears to be set in Savonarola’s time, but is actually a contemporary one about the Taliban’s purity police. All of these are good and, as mentioned already, the ‘Non-finito’ section really remarkable. Caroline Maldonado is a poet not to be missed.