Izabrane Pesme by Vasa Mihailovi

Abstract

Dunya Mikhail The Iraqi Nights Kareem James Abu-Zeid, tr. New Directions Dunya Mikhail reprises the role of Scheherazade in her collection of poems that thread together ancient history and current events. Her poetry seeks to confront death through stories of grief and love and look beyond to a brighter future despite the presence of destruction. Kat Meads 2:12 a.m. Stephen F. Austin State University Press In this humorous collection of personal essays, Kat Meads takes readers on a series of adventures hosted by her own insomnia. Guests experience journeys ranging from the swamps of North Carolina to the Atomic Testing Museum. An accomplice in travel and thought, 2:12 a.m. accompanies us on what would otherwise be a solitary journey through thought, time, and space (see WLT, Nov. 2013, 55–56). Nota Bene arranged in three sections: Metaphysics , The Politics of Resistance, and The Future Looms. The complexity of her thoughts and subtle mood changes make her poems a pleasure to read. They are not without humor—as in the poem “Time Sits Heavily,” which opens, “In the middle of the night, it becomes apparent / that your brain is leaking. This is a symptom, surely / but not the first.” The poems have a delightful sense of wondering what is real—if what we see is truly reliable—and questions the durability of relationships and the parts we are assigned. She is at home with the constellations and the classical gods. Time is echoed again and again in her work: the brevity of our lives, the mysterious appearances time marks in our spans, the importance of the sun, moon, dawn, and dusk—as rivers run, wheels turn. Lerman’s search for unity, meaning , becoming, and order is breathtaking in its reach. We are invited to join her in this universal quest and rejoice when there are closures or glimpses of understanding in our modern life. The poet uses the pronouns “you,” “she,” and “we” to the exclusion of “I”; her poems remind one of the definition of poetry by Octavio Paz: “Poetry is not what words say but what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences.” Lerman, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, shows us that the common often grants glimpses of the mystery of living—illusory truths, the universal aspects just beyond our human ability and understanding. Her poems beg multiple readings. Carol Smallwood Mt. Pleasant, Michigan Vasa Mihailović. Izabrane Pesme. Belgrade. Tanesi. 2013. isbn 9788681567708 With 131 mostly prose poems in six named sections, we get a clear picture of the Serbian American poet Vasa Mihailović (now eighty-eight years of age), who emigrated to the United States after being a prisoner of war in Italy and Germany during World War II. He taught Slavic literature at UNC Chapel Hill for many years before he retired. He has published eleven books of prose poetry, two of haiku poetry, four collections of short stories , translations of ex-Yugoslavian authors, several anthologies, a memoir , and numerous reviews for World Literature Today. The first section, “Frescoes Written by Life,” is filled with observations about Serbian monasteries , as in “Ravanica,” where children abandoned by their parents are taken care of by nuns, or in “Bogorodica Ljeviška,” where the visitors “take off a piece of its wall because they believe in its healing for women who November–December 2014 • 67 reviews cannot get pregnant.” The second section, “Ave Patria,” returns to Serbian history and events from the perspective of an emigrant who dreams of returning to his idealized homeland but, when he does, cannot find anyone to communicate with and returns to the US disappointed. In the section “From Spring into Winter,” he observes nature and different seasons, followed with a section of love poems for an unidentified love, presumably his deceased wife, whom he misses. He recalls Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” which they listened to when they first met. In the section “Memories ,” he returns to childhood, his old house, his father playing a melody for him on a violin, and the passing of his mother. The final, longest section, “Images and...