Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“A FIELD OFFICER’S NOTEBOOK – Selected Poems” by Dan Davin, edited with an introduction by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ29:95); “THE QUEST” by Yannis Kyrlis (English language translation by Maria Georgala) (Austen Macauley Publishers, no price given); “WALKING TO JUTLAND STREET” by Michael Steven (Otago University Press, $NZ 27:50); “THE FACTS” by Therese Lloyd (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “ARE FRIENDS ELECTRIC?” by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); “WINTER EYES” by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, $NZ25); "WHISPER OF A CROW'S WING" by Majella Cullinane (Otago University Press, $NZ27:50)

 

Dan Davin (1913-1990) was best known as a novelist, short-story writer and academic publisher. He had only a few poems published in his lifetime and was not primarily known as a poet. Nevertheless, he did fill notebooks with poems and ideas for poems, none of which have hitherto been made public. Robert McLean has selected, edited and written a very informative introduction to A Field Officer’s Notebook, presenting what he sees as the best of Davin’s published and unpublished poems. The title was one which Davin himself considered for such a collection.

As McLean’s introduction explains, Davin wrote poetry in three periods of his life only, marked in this collection by the headings “Before”, “During” and “After”. The “Before” was in the late 1930s, when Davin was a young man in England, remembering New Zealand and considering a career. The “During” was the Second World War, probably the pivotal period of Davin’s life, when he served with the New Zealand Division in Crete, North Africa and Italy. The “After” was years later, in old age in the 1980s and in retirement from the world of publishing.

McLean speaks of Davin’s “inescapable minor key” in that so many of these poems are wistful, lamenting, accepting of death without eternal rewards and only occasionally finding pleasure in nostalgic, fragmented memories of childhood. In McLean’s view the poems written during the war are Davin’s best.  McLean characterises the poets of the First World War as moving from “idealism to cynicism”, whereas the poets of the Second World War moved from “cynicism to nihilism”. This, he says, was Davin’s course. Though inflected with classical allusions, the poems Davin wrote in North Africa are ironic and raw. They are, says McLean “insistently negative”. He contrasts Davin’s war poems with those of New Zealand’s two best-known servicemen poets of the Second World War, M.K. Joseph and Denis Glover. Davin, he notes, wrote his best wartime poems while the conflict was still in progress. The other two poets wrote in postwar recollection.

This is all the framework of A Field Officer’s Notebook, but what of the poems themselves? We cannot escape the fact that they are poems of their time. Many of the later poems are free-form – perhaps in an “unfinished” state – while the earlier ones tend to be in stricter traditional metres. It is impossible to ignore the dated diction that the younger  man often favours (“ponder” “chide” etc.)

The poems of the “Before” section present a young man’s anxieties, not just in having left comfortable childhood behind, but in the sense of having so far achieved nothing in his life (see especially the poem “In what diversity of sterile tasks”). Perhaps there is a touch of envy at those who got ahead of him academically, as in “Had I constrained my spirit then”,  written in 1937, where Davin claims to spurn Academe in favour of Bohemia. In its entirety, it goes thus:

Had I constrained my spirit then


To put on learning’s gown


I might have scorned the life of men

And walked with the scholar’s frown.

Well-informed I should have strode

Lettered and erudite


Subscribing to a college code


And mouthing maxims trite.

I might have lost humanity

And withered to a don


But I preferred profanity

Love and demijohn.

Well, perhaps Davin preferred cussing, shagging and drinking to scholarship, but the preference clearly wasn’t unmixed.

The general tone of the “During” section is less defensive. When Davin writes of the dead under snow, he sees no consolation. His poem “Haunted by mysteries, life, time, and death” does not accept the concept (so much a focus for Wallace Stevens) that living joys and sensuality are made more precious and wonderful by the prospect of annihilation in death. Davin won’t accept even that apologia for death, because death haunts and pollutes the joys of life, as in the lines “Wolves exiled from the light / Their jealousies prowl still / About the brief campfires of our love, / Living a ghoulish life / within the echoes of our laughter”. Davin cannot write a poem about soldiers enjoying an evening boozing and having a knees-up. Instead his poem “Morning Fatigue in the Canteen” depicts the morning-after clean up of cigarette butts and slops.

The most finished poems of Davin’s wartime experience are, it seems to me, three of the most confronting. “Egyptian Madonna” is a poem of disgust as the poet describes in horrible detail the sight of an undernourished child being suckled by an impoverished mother. “Cairo Cleopatra” is just as explicit in its view of a prostitute – or at least of a prostitute’s body being used by many soldiers. As for “Grave near Sirte”, the harshest poem in the book, it concerns the complete anonymity of death and the way we inevitably forget the dead, regardless of what the monuments say.

The imagery of some of the poems in the “After” section clearly sets them in the London of the 1980s. Some, dare I say it, are trite aphorisms. There are memories of Davin’s Irish-New Zealand childhood, and he babbles of the green fields, perhaps covered in gorse, of Gore and Invercargill. Yet he is still frequently referencing and re-imagining the war, with fragments of a poem about El Alamein, and quoted snatches of an ironic song about Ravenstein (the German general who was captured in North Africa by a detachment of New Zealanders). His envoi to the war is “Why not be dead?” which goes thus: “Why not be dead? / 
The old dead soldier said.
/ It’s really far less trouble
 / And there are no orders, no jankers, here, /  To be carried out at the double.”

This is the best epitaph the unhappy ex-soldier poet could write for himself.

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It is flattering when a man on the other side of the world writes and asks me if I could review on my blog his collection of short stories. When the Greek writer Yannis Kyrlis wrote from Athens to ask if I would review The Quest, I readily said I would. This slim volume (138 pages) consists of twelve short stories, many of them very brief. The longest is the title-story “The Quest” at 32 pages, followed by “Just Don’t Forget the Way” at 30 pages.

Most [but not all] of the collection’s shorter stories are written in the detached third-person voice and most take the form of fables, parables or visions – more extended image than sequential narrative. The settings are often unreal – I hesistate to say surreal – being both everywhere and nowhere. In “The Threat” a man defends his house from men who want to destroy it – or do they? “The Sceptre” has lovers quarrelling near a rubbish dump, where a walking cane becomes a symbol for antiquated patriarchal authority. “Some Black Birds” is a simple shocker while “Confessions in a Café” presents a rather convoluted discussion in a café between older and younger people of artistic pretensions, ending with a reconciliation between the generations. Symbolism – or extended metaphor – hangs heavily over some stories. “The Stranger” presents a literal foot race as the epitome of the urban rat race. “The Painter of St George” shows a painter’s confidence ruined by a hostile review. “Before the Dawn” is a soul journey story set among street people. “The Little Girl with Cloth Legs” plays with very heavy symbolism indeed as an alluring childhood memory is exorcised by a Witch (or is that Fate?). “The Course of a Crisis” is most definitely a parable, about our need for enemies in order to sharpen our thoughts.

            Thus I have name-checked my way through nearly all of this volume’s shorter offerings. They sound at least a little like the shorter pieces of Kafka in their arbitrary conclusions and not-quite-diagnosed sense of menace. I would advise that they be read carefully, one at a time, or their simlarity of style could become oppressive.

Far more interesting, I think, are the two longer pieces, both written in the first person and therefore perhaps signalling a greater engagement on the author’s part. Oddly, one is a dreamlike, almost surreal piece, while the other is strictly realistic.

“The Quest” is the surreal one, of the Alice-in-Wonderland variety with its abrupt transitions. The narrator has literally lost his heart and is fishing for it in murky water. People incite him to suicide. He is set before a sort of tribunal, convened in a tavern, which accuses him of wilfully losing his heart. His friend and protector is called “the Illustrator”. At one point his heart is a leaf hanging on a tree. At another he is confronted by a powerful female figure who accuses him of throwing his heart away on her. It is hard to read “The Quest” without plucking out symbols – the dead tree, the tower, and perhaps “the Illustrator”, symbolising conscience or art – something that can put the narrator’s experiences into words and can rationalise them. But as to what it means…. like most surrealism, it simply is not reducable to a formula. Kafka’s K. really would be at home in its atmosphere of meaningless menace – a nightmare in images.

Personal taste leads me to relate much more favourably to “Just Don’t Forget the Way”, a realistic presentation of the childhood memories of a man who lived in an impoverished village – not that the poverty is played up by the narrator, who would have been too young to diagnose such things. Poverty is implied by the fact that the narrator’s father has had to leave for Germany to find work and it is implied by the bitter quarrels housewives have over nothing – that nothing being the meagre rations they have to feed their families. At one point, the narrator’s gang of kids find the corpse of  a man who has committed suicide, presumably from despair. This is a robust and straightforward child’s narrative, and it gives a kid’s eye-view of (Greek) political events that the kid does not understand. Only towards the end do we realise that it is set just after the Colonels have staged their coup.

But there is one snag in this story. It has to do with the uncertain nature of the translation from Greek into English. The matter is not as evident in the volume’s more surreal stories, where unrealistic flourishes of language are part of the territory.  But in a realistic story like “Just Don’t Forget the Way”, it is jarring to find a kid saying “he will bestow me his bicycle” or “a new kid who came lately to our neighbourhood”, or for one quarrelling woman to use the word “foolish” as a form of address, as in “What can you tell me, foolish?” rather than something like “you fool”. To me, this unidiomatic English suggests that English is not the translator’s first language.

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            I have to provide a collective apology to the five poets whose work I cover very briefly in what follows. On this blog, I try to consider collections of poetry in detail, but given that I am now posting only fortnightly, this is becoming harder to do, so – not for the first time – I am here providing “notices” rather full-length critiques. I hope this is satisfactory. 

This may be a brash thing to say, but Michael Steven’s debut volume Walking to Jutland Street fills me with an odd sort of nostalgia. It situations itself in a well-established New Zealand tradition – as the blurb says, it’s partly under the influence of New Zealand poets Olds, Orr, Johnson and (maybe) Baxter. This is the realist poetry of blokes in hard circumstances, in the workshop or in the grotty Dunedin student flat, sometimes among bums, beats, hopheads [cor! listen to my dated slang!] – in a word Bohemians, trying to find some sort of karmic truth. I like the plain statement of all this and I note there’s another layer of nostagia here in that Steven himself is clearly looking back on his life as it was and not as it is. The excellent descriptive title poem “Walking Jutland Street” says as much, especially in its closing line “I am writing these lines from another life.” In saying it’s realist, I’m not dismissing this very arresting collection as a series of literalist snapshots. Steven peppers his verse with unexpected jabs of telling imagery, and he has a wicked ironic wit. Check out one of his best, “Educating SR-3781”, which uses a funny-sad story to point up the difference between machine and human being. In an odd sort of way, Steven moralises, too. The opening poem might be a wild childhood cavort with an excited tone of whoop-de-do, and later ones have rich descriptions of travel in Asia – but as for the Bohemian ones, Steven often admits that there was a destructive side to the Bohemian life.

Therese Lloyd’s The Facts is a book of withdrawal, of unhappiness, of a desperate attempt to find something positive in life. A number of her poems are [to use a word she herself uses in her notes] ekphrastic – that is, they are comments on existing works of art or images, and there is a section which plays variations on the poetry of Mallarme. I think I am justified in saying that some of them are fairly opaque. Central to the collection, however, is the sense of aging and, apparently, an account of a marriage that didn’t work. So the tone is often very confessional. I found myself most absorbed in two poems. The first is the prose poem “On Looking at Photographs in High School Yearbooks”, which negotiates cleverly the task of being at once dismissive of, and nostalgic for, what is now dead and gone. The second is the eponymous nine-page poem “The Facts”, a consciously candid view of a failing marriage written more in lucid dissection than in anger. Its imagery is both complex and engaging, but also often bleak. I have to agree with Hera Lindsay Bird’s comment (quoted in the blurb) that this book “won’t make you feel better”.

I am going to begin by admitting a prejudice. I am prejudiced in favour of the poetry of Helen Heath. When I reviewed her first collection Graft on this blog in 2012, I praised her for her humane clear-headedness and her engagement with science. I find these same qualities in her new collection Are Friends Electric?, although this is a volume that heads in some new directions. The first section (also called “Are Friends Electric?”) is heavily footnoted as it contains many “found poems” and many allusions to, or quotations from, other people’s texts. Often I find the concept of “found poems” offputting. Too often they become exercises in isolating, and implicitly being ironical or mocking about, what somebody else has written. But this is not Helen Heath’s style. What she finds she transforms. The sequence about “Strandbeests” really does become an engrossing reflection on human-made concepts and imagined evolutionary processes. Even more arresting, the prose poem “The Anthropocene” connects us human beings with bird-calls in a most unexpected and refreshing way. If I do not connect as whole-heartedly with the poems, in this first section, on love and relationships, it may simply be that they reflect the mores of a generation different from my own. The second long section, called “Reprogramming the Heart” is more confessional. Most of its poems are in the first person, dealing with pregnancy, birth, motherhood and (apparently) widowhood among other things. The matter of technology and science is not forgotten, however, for Heath has a consistent train of images linking us [human beings] to the cyber world and to artificial intelligence. Once again, her style is polished and her expression is clear.

I can take Winter Eyes only to mean the eyes of somebody who is heading into winter – that is, getting nearer to old age. In Harry Ricketts’ latest collection, the words come from the last line of the poem “Sansibar oder der letzte Grund”, which asserts “Things look different through winter eyes”. These poems are indeed elegaic and backward looking in the main. Many appear to reach back to mildly-raffish student years (listening to rock music and taking hols on the Continent) and the years of being an aspiring academic. There are a number of anecdotes concerning well-known literary identities either met or talked about, and of course there are references to canonical literature.  Some poems seem to allude to a youthful love (or do they?) and some are certainly about a lost relationship with a stepson. Not that this is maudlin. The tone is more often jocular , knowing and perhaps resigned. I am not sure that Harry Ricketts would necessarily appreciate the comparison, but I read this collection with the same sort of pleasure I get from reading the chattier, more relaxed poems of W.H.Auden’s mellow years. They are urbane and often witty.

Majella Cullinane’s Whisper of a Crow’s Wing is an extraordinary book and unexpected in the sense that it is a type of poetry rarely published in New Zealand now. Suggesting a strong awareness of earlier forms, the collection’s epigraph is, fittingly, a quotation from Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”. An Irish expatriate now resident in New Zealand, Majella Cullinane combines a romantic sensibility with a modernist sharpness. Her poetry has much very Irish (Catholic) imagery together with specifically New Zealand imagery. (The blurb tells me it is being published simultaneously in New Zealand and Ireland). There is much reference to a deep past. The whole section “The Hours” links the traditional monastic canonical hours with present day urban life. Much of the final section “Cut Away the Masts” (including the surging and terrifying poem “A Woman Was Seen”) is based on materials drawn from letters written in the nineteenth century. In the poem “Displaced”, it is as if Cullinane has inserted herself into the spirit of an immigrant from earlier centuries. Nature is numinous in the world depicted here.  And it is easily anthropomorphised. There is “a gust throwing the eucalyptus on the hill into a quandary” in the poem “First Light”. Crows are portents of death in the collection’s title poem; or they are linked to the human skill of literacy, as in “the black letters on this page / as they move across the white space, which remind me / of crows stalking frozen trees” (in “Finale to the Season”). I do not wish to be reductive, but the general tone of this collection is a sense of longing. Whisper of a Crow’s Wing is fey in the original and non-pejorative sense of the word – it senses the presence of things not quite seen (see the poem“Seeing Things”). There is much mist, much fog, much sea-coast. Am I resorting to racial stereotypes if I say it is very Celtic? Yet it is also confessional. The whole section “As Good As” appears to refer to a miscarriage in mythological terms and includes the wrenching line “I would fashion the smallest gap you could sneak through” . I’m impressed.

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books 

 

“GRAFT” by Helen Heath (Victoria University Press, $NZ28)

“JUST THEN” by Harry Ricketts (Victoria University Press, $NZ25)

“BIRDS OF CLAY” by Aleksandra Lane (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

            Three new volumes of poetry from Victoria University Press constitute this week’s “Something New”.

            As I said in an earlier posting [look up comments on Shift via the index at right], I know it is a very unsophisticated thing to read poetry in order to dig out details of the poet’s autobiography. But sometimes it is hard to avoid doing this. Helen Heath’s new collection Graft tells us much about her interests and her family circumstances. She has some Greek heritage. She is intensely interested in science and in women’s place in science. And she is a mother.

            Divided into three sections Graft addresses all these matters, but not necessarily in this order.

            The first section, “Spiral Arms”, moves through poems reflecting on well-known scientists; poems that play variations on fairy tales; and some poems that appear to be thoughts on the death of a mother. In all these poems, some of Heath’s preoccupations are clear. She is interested in motherhood. She is interested in the phenomenon of sight, and hence of what constitutes clear-sightedness. She is aware of the uncertainty of the material universe; and she is aware of the certainly of death. Three of the poems refer to women scientists who died of cancer or radium poisoning contracted in the course of their researches.

            I understand that Heath wishes to celebrate the originality and endeavour of these women scientists, but one of her best qualities is a deliberate moral ambiguity, allowing for a more engaged response from readers. To put it another way, she is no simplistic feminist propagandist. For example, her poem on Beatrice Tinsley “Spiral Arms” is finely balanced, setting Tinsley’s fiercely-logical scientific mind against not only the limitation of death, but also the limitations of Tinsley’s own emotional life. The scientist is admired, but not canonised. In similar vein [and even though Heath identifies herself as an atheist elsewhere in this volume], the poem on Rosalind Franklin “Faith in this world” goes far towards suggesting that Franklin’s creed of pure materialism was defective.

            The deconstruction of fairy-tales is often in terms of gender roles, as in the poem that notes mothers are “defined by… absence” in stories that deal with wicked stepmothers. Regarding mothers, the poem “The Whole Woman” recalls a mother who, in what many will see as a recognisable paradox, was “built like a bird, with hollow bones, / she relied on her eyes for discipline”. The strength of the apparently fragile!

            The  second section, “Ithaca”, recalls a journey to Greece and consists of two pieces, the fifteen shorts poems labelled “Postcards” and the title poem “Graft”.

One of the “Postcards” poems is called “Up the hill” and gives me such delight that I quote it in full:

The truth about raindrops is

they are not shaped like tears.

As raindrops fall they become balls,

burger buns, parachutes, then doughnuts.

Rain is only sad in wet places,

others greet it with euphoria.

Water is containment and travel,

it worries at earth and stone.

Things do smell better after rain, like

wild oregano up the hill from Vathy.

            In a way, this little poem is emblematic of Heath’s larger technique. There is that specificity of observation. Each stanza presents a new proposition about rain in general – a demonstrable and provable statement -  with the last one bringing the poem back to the specific place her sequence is observing.

            Much of the “Postcards” cycle draws on the contradiction of a continuing traditional peasant culture in an age of high tech – and the fact that the tourists who come to observe it (including, presumably, the poet) are also destroying it. One poem is ironically called “Lonely planet”. The cycle ends with a reflection in a derelict church and the poet wanting to know the material world better.

            As Heath’s notes explain of the title poem “Graft”, the word ‘graft’ has many meanings, such as fusing two plants or digging (hence “grave”). I wonder how much Helen Heath was also thinking of “graft” as in the old colloquial “hard graft” meaning hard work. The poem records digging into the hard earth, in search of ancestral roots.

            More diverse in subject matter, the third section, “Truth and Fiction”, has poems of adolescent recall and of domesticity, but gradually moves into dream imagery and ends with poems about a woman having an abortion. The volume’s one genuinely funny poem, “Spilt”, conveys what must be a relatively common domestic scene when a young woman is lactating.

            It occurs to me that I have really botched this review by telling you about the volume’s contents without analysing any poem in detail, or adding layers of mystification as reviewers of poetry are wont to do. I’m not really sorry I haven’t done this, however. What I have tried to convey is my pleasure in poems that have such a forthright voice, such exact imagery and clear-headedness allied to a humane sensibility. Science fascinates Helen Heath, but she is aware that a scientific approach is only one way of encountering reality. If it was the only way, then there would be no impulse to write poems.

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            Helen Heath’s poems are often earnest and serious. By contrast, the dominant tone in Harry Ricketts’ latest collection, Just Then, is playfulness.

            Sometimes this entails literal play, with poems that recall boyhood games of Cowboys-and-Indians and an ongoing interest in cricket. Three poems appear in the form of numbered lists. Three are blocks of free-rambling prose. Ricketts includes poems about having the imagination of a child and about his younger self [sometimes addressed as “you”] in love. Three rhyming ditties apparently date from the 1970s. There is an affecting piece on the awkwardness of trying to talk to a father about intimate adolescent matters. There are also poems in which Ricketts himself is the father, expressing pride in his children or reconstructing the former child in his grown son, who is now part of a rock group (“Phoenix Foundation”).

            More than anything, though, his collection relies on literary and cultural references. They come thick and fast from the opening poem “El Prado” where the poet, under-whelmed by a gallery of Renaissance religious art, speaks of one viewer “randy for epiphany”, which immediately makes us think of Larkin’s Church-Going “ruin-bibber randy for antique”. References in the free-ranging prose-poem about lost-object-finding St.Anthony suggest it comes from the time when Ricketts was writing a book about First World War poets.

            Elsewhere, there’s a poem about reading detective novels; an appropriately sardonic poem about poetry slams; a poem called “NZ Lit XI” which forms NZ Lit names into a cricket team and provokes hyper-critical old me to remark that NZ Lit doesn’t really have enough major achievers to form a First XI; and poems about Louis Johnson, half-forgotten novelist John Wain and old Beat faker Allen Ginsberg.

            As I’m already revealing by my editorial comments here, one of the problems I have with reading poems about literature is that I am always measuring the poet’s opinions on the said literature against my own; rather than considering the poems as poems. In both “Arty Bees” and “Wendy Cope in Newtown, Sydney”, Ricketts reacts to second-hand books, and I find myself saying “Yes, I’ve done exactly that sort of musing about the previous owners of books I have bought second-hand”. When I read Ricketts’ poem  “How the 2008 modern poetry class cast its vote” I find myself saying that I can’t agree with the verdict of his 2008 class.

            With the deepest of respect, and having amused myself greatly by reading it, Just Then often reminds me of the title of W.H.Auden’s volume of cultured clerihews - Academic Graffiti. It is a fun intellectual game.

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            Of the three volumes of poetry under review, the most formidable and the one with the most challenging texture is Alexsandra Lane’s Birds of Clay. A Serb by birth and a New Zealander by choice since 1996, Lane has previously published two volumes of poetry in her mother tongue. Birds of Clay is her first collection in English.

            Naturally she is preoccupied with identities, old and new. The volume’s first five poems [presented without a general title] combine dream imagery with peasant concerns about Easter and cooking and possible political upheavals; but their setting is deliberately vague and dream-like. There follows the experimental cycle “War Interrupted”, which appears to be memories of civil war, presumably in former Yugoslavia, and of neighbours and families drawn apart in their use of language and attitudes. The cycle yields what I consider this volume’s most striking pair of lines, describing the parents of affected children: “under the canopy of scars/ we stepped on our children’s language.”

            The sequence of fifteen prose poems that bear the volume’s title, “Birds of Clay”, reflect on Serbian village life. I wonder about their title, which is in no apparent way connected with the sequence. Does it imply that birds of clay can’t fly away, but they can be shot at (as in clay pigeons)? Is there another war tremor about to rumble over these inconsequential observations on family and mating and village rambles?

            With the sequence “Another Legendary Sky”, the collection moves away from the village and becomes global, ultimately connecting the old country with New Zealand. Its words are set out on the page like the patterns of constellations. Ursus the Bear is dwelt upon, not visible in the southern hemisphere any more than real European bears are. Last in this sequence is “Crux” (i.e. the Southern Cross) which is “hiding behind/ the round/ curve of the earth,/ trapped in another hemisphere, another legendary sky.” To change countries is to change the legendary background noise.

            The “Bullet Time” sequence is, as I read it, about the conflict between pragmatism [or Realpolitik] and love. In it, the collection’s most overtly polemical poem “The Economist” posits the type of limited rationalised thinking, typical of neo-liberals, in which human needs count for less than the economic balance-sheet. Some of the poems in the next sequence “A Little Too Rare” explicitly compare Serbia and New Zealand. They also highlight the imagery of eggs that is found throughout the collection – as I read it, an image of life existing in potential and potential allowing for change.

            It is not surprising that somebody concerned with other languages should produce a sequence called “Affairs of Grammar and Style”.  The last sequence in the collection “There Are No Ghosts in America” is a cycle of “found” poems based on the words of Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla. Each poem is headed up with a Serbian proverb (e.g. “A man wants to be better than everyone but worse than his son.”). The whole cycle gives evidence of a man with wild inspiration, a wild imagination and a rough childhood. Given Tesla’s current reputation ad status, they might also be expressive of Serbian national pride.

            I had to work hard at reading many of these poems. The typographical mannerisms (especially in the sequences “War Interrupted” and “Another Legendary Sky”) ask for concentration but do not necessarily reward it. The prose poems are not noticeably rhythmical. While images are clear, meaning is sometimes opaque, even after repeated readings. I find something unfinished and un-worked in this collection. To some readers that will be a recommendation.