A Wake for the Living » (Bilingual - Serbian/English)

Radmila Lazic is a noted Serbian poet, editor, and activist. This is the first English translation of her work.

Charles Simic won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection The World Doesn't End. He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire.

Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic introduces and translates the poems of Serbian feminist, activist, and writer Radmila Lazic

Dead-born will be your wishes.

Your every hope will be a widow.

And as for love, there won't be enough

To spread on a slice of bread.

—from "Twilight Metaphysics"

Translated and introduced with the surrealist wit that is Charles Simic's signature, A Wake for the Living offers American readers, for the first time in English, the brilliance of Serbian poet Radmila Lazic. Through her compelling and strange leaps and dodges, Lazic describes an identity-personal and political-informed by catastrophe and victimization that restlessly and imaginatively swerves into irreverence and often-comic absurdity. "Goodness is boring," she writes, "It seems it's hell I'm getting myself ready for." These poems careen from the poet's lament for beauty faded to her "Dorothy Parker Blues" to her searching for names among obituaries to her sexual desires without obligation, with the virtuosity that has made her one of Eastern Europe's best and most vivacious contemporary poets.

Library Journal

Poetry readers will welcome this bilingual collection, the first English translation of works by Serbian poet and activist Lazic, who founded the Civil Resistance Movement against Milosevic's tyranny. Lazic is honest and straightforward, whether she's commenting on crumbling relationships ("In my eyes you're a wet matchstick/ I'm a package of meat in the freezer of your chest"), detailing the ways in which war has affected daily life ("He was on his way home/ To a country/ Whose citizens return/ Like blind travelers/ Without daydreams, without tears"), or describing the approach of old age ("I'll be a wicked old woman/ Thin as a rail"). Her poetry is often sexually open, with strong images and language often centering on her sharp sense of humor ("I don't want to follow the leaden movement of the watchbands,/ Nor see falling stars/ For him to gore me drunkenly like an elephant", realizing "Alleluia! Alleluia!/ I don't want a bridegroom"). Effectively translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Simic, this illuminating work is recommended for contemporary poetry collections.-Heather Wright, AWBERC Lib., U.S. EPA, Cincinnati Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.