Anxious Moments - Softcover

Debeljak, Ales

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1877727350 ISBN 13: 9781877727351

Publisher: White Pine Press, 1995

Synopsis

poetry, Slovene, tr C Merrill, preface C Simic

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Written over a year before civil war broke out in the former republic of Yugoslavia, this introduction to English-speaking readers of a poet highly acclaimed in his homeland cannot help but be read in light of recent events. With a haunting sense of urgency and prophecy, the speaker searches "the depths of memory" for "destroyed villages you wanted to forget." Indistinct himself, the speaker's landscape is peopled with shadows. A cigarette butt, a littered street, an open window or a doorstep suddenly take on epic proportions. The dominoes children play with are "made from the bones of animals." Rain inexplicably seems to presage an earthquake. Absorbed within these highly evocative landscapes, man at first seems to be at war with nature; as page piles on page, we begin to realize it's man at war with man, with nature caught in the crossfire. But man does have a choice, Debeljak tells the reader, in what also seems an attempt to convince himself. While these seven lyrical prose-poem sequences have a travel theme, the emotional climax comes in the book's last three sections: here men can stay or go; each is responsible for his own fate. Readers, by this time hanging on the speaker's every word, are left mercilessly on the precipice.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: White Pine Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1877727350
• ISBN 13: 9781877727351
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 78