Editorial: April 2008

31 maart 2008 This month’s Croatian poetry neatly dovetails with the City & Country festival theme, one of the poets, Slađan Lipovec, examining Nature, a frequent revivalist theme in contemporary poetry. Editor Milos Drdevic writes: “Nature in his poems appears as the widest, global framework of life and as a powerful, all-encompassing current that permeates and connects urban and rural spaces and has a deep impact on the way every individual leads his or her life.”  How does this come out in his poems?  Quite distinctively and playfully, it transpires:

when they called me I turned down
the music put aside
the book and climbed out of
the parentheses and then we drink
coffee and brandy spit
in our hands take up
the pitchforks and load
manure . . .      (‘1996. Just Another Morning’)

Or:

. . . you have to write
fast and all the time
when you’re writing about clouds and men
so that elusive shapes of words
do not follow one
transitional shape
but describe
at least the smallest
arch of the crazy circle
where everything
goes around      (‘Clouds’)

Drummer in a post-punk band, Marko Pogačar, describes a life lived at top speed. He adopts a wilful anti-lyrical style (“I don’t give a damn about/ maniere”) and hard-fought cynicism (“I stopped thinking because it leads nowhere”). As you’d expect, there’s more City than Country in his work: “When steel cranes dropped the last nuclear power plant on the city / your origami heart burst like a glass ball”. (‘To The Lost Halves’). I can’t help wondering if he’s a secret romantic.

Rather alarmingly, Simon Patton had to drag Bai Hua’s poems “kicking and screaming into English”. That the translations require footnotes is a clear sign of a significant cultural divide. A writer in the classical Chinese tradition, Hua attempts to apply its lessons to the modern world. His conciseness and strong imagery are appealing.

At this moment you are making a poem
Which amounts to making a sunken ship
A black tree
Or a rain-shrouded embankment   (‘Precipice’)

Kazue Shinkawa from Japan is a matriarchal figure in Japanese poetry. Yasuhiro Yotsumoto mentions that she has been searching for her true self; her poetry certainly speaks to me of a personal quest and a certain isolation. Like Bai Hua, she is also very skilled in the use of concrete metaphors. See ‘As I Sit On The Grass’ or ‘Lacking’ for examples.

Colombian poet, Ángela García, is another strong female presence in this month’s issue. Gabriel Jaime Franco is relieved that her poetry is free of “the empty and repetitive bedroom eroticism” that has apparently plagued women’s poetry from Colombia. One has to wonder. The reflective nature of her poetry recalls Shinkawa’s but it is more abstract in terms of imagery, and more romantic:

Something solid connects me to you
Like kinship
A hidden stream
In season’s change
[....]
Something connects me to you
Solid like a natural law    (‘Declaration of Silence’)

Our final poet in this issue, Eduardo Gómez, is an urban poet. He describes “foresaken alleys”, “one night cheap hotels”, shanty-town poverty, vagrants. His view of the city is politicized, challenging and yet poetic:

The street-dweller is made
of doves in flight and withered dreams;
of colorless dawns and warm bodies,
the retreat to his refuge.    (‘Dawn I’)

Enjoy the poetry. See you in May.