I wI I > I I * I I z I I WI I * I ? I I H I < I I * I WI I H I I Q I I I I * I O I of rains in his imagination, where he shelters themultiple voices that evoke the contemporary scenario. An unknowable bird of memory flies in the gray skies, reminding him of his loneliness, that of an inward-looking man who embraces silence and absence. The multiple voices of rains also tune the cadence and rhythm that form Mohanty's creative process, demonstrating a poetic genius pro gressing from the literal to the meta phoric and symbolic. Words that evoke musical sound and thought provoking sense, images that are poetic mirrors, and symbols that make the abstract concrete?read ers are spellbound by the impact of these poems and the Indian words that put the reader in touch with the land. These are the characteristic qualities that give freshness to the poems ofNiranjan Mohanty. SudhirK. Arora M./.P. RohilkhandUniversity,Bareilly Brane Mozetic. Banalities. Elizabeta 2argi & TimothyLiu, trs.New York.A Midsummer Night's Press (SPD, distr.). 2008. 64 pages. $10.95. isbn 978-0 9794208-3-2 "Anywhere out of the world" would satisfy Baudelaire's soul, but the persona in Brane Mozetic's linked sequence of fifty poems knows that despite dreams of "escape," a word that echoes throughout the volume as frequently as "alone," every place?Africa, America, the night mare cityof Ljubljana?is the same. Streets are gray and empty; the vision ofnight lifeisphantasmagoric, dark, a negative image of thecentral panel of Brueghel's Garden ofEarthly Delight; the poet's room is either a prison or an ordered refuge thatno one can enter. Visions of a lifewhere people love, tranquilly look at the sunset, and read old books seem to him absurd. Inhis past, his grandfa ther,"the first who realized that I'm not worthy / of life,"exiled him to thepigpen and thendropped a stick on him; then "They"?family, soci ety??"murdered me, slowly, year / afteryear" before "You strangled me ..." He has so little sense of self thathe can't fillout a formtoplace a personal ad. Brief moments of peace and contentment flash from thepast: the first clumsy attempts at physical intimacy, theboy who liked togive him rides on his bicycle and hold his hand before recoiling fromhis feel ings and becoming fat and stupid. Everything else, in thewrenching catalog of things "To forget" in the final poem in the sequence, seems futileor painful or both. Still, though he says here that "many things / won't roll offmy tongue and Iprefer tohide, be silent, prefer / to forget,"somehow poetry is made even though "I'm too stupid to write smart poems"; although the chronicle of "stoned poets" and compensatory sex "is definitely not poetry"; and although an evening of poetry fails to happen and "not even a poem was made, only banal /prose we might have called imma ture,hard to classify / as great lit erature," something is salvaged and set forthinmeasured language that fallssomewhere between poetry and prose. The result,thoughoften impres sive, is difficult to characterize. Brane Mozetic's speaker refuses to overstate or romanticize, wants to disappear but maintains a ghostly presence in theworld, and with a desperate courage silently echoes Beckett's Unnamable: "I can't go on. I'll go on." Robert Murray Davis Universityof Oklahoma New European Poets. Wayne Miller& Kevin Pr?fer, eds. St. Paul, Minnesota. Graywolf. 2008. xxx + 401 pages. $18. isbn978-1-55597-492-3 Although American readers are familiar with the names of major earlyand mid-twentieth-century European poets?Montale, Akhma tova, Celan, Transtr?mer?the names of contemporary poets born and active in the latterpart of the century and into the current century are considerably lesswell known. It was the task ofWayne Miller and Kevin Pr?fer to address and update this gap in knowledge by enlisting thehelp of twenty-fourregional edi torswho selected and translated the verse of 270 poets whose work was first published after 1970. The result is a major anthology that represents all countries inEurope and includes thework ofmany new poets who are published here for the firsttime inEnglish. The language styles of these poems comprise a striking range of contrasts. Poets who use more tra ditional, metaphoric language like Italy's Valerio Magrelli, Sweden's Hakan Sandell, and Ireland's Nuala .IIIIII. .1.11111111111111111111111111111111. 74 i World Literature Today ...