Colonialist paeans and postcolonial poetics: Leopold P. Sanguinetti’s The Calpean Sonnets and Giordano Durante’s West

This article compares and contrasts the Gibraltar-themed poetry of Gibraltarian writers Leopold P. Sanguinetti and Giordano Durante. It argues that while Sanguinetti’s (1958) collection, The Calpean Sonnets , contributed to the cultural construction of a pro-imperial British identity on the Rock, Durante’s debut book of poetry, West (2017), sketches the emergence of a postcolonial collective self among the Gibraltarian people. In addition, the article argues that the representation of Gibraltar and of the Gibraltarians in James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses , serves as an intertextual precursor for Durante’s poetics and preoccupations.