I try to dig the way I’m told,
But it’s worse than learning Slovak.
My spade turns a clod of sound.
A tongue of iron hesitates
And trembles over it as if
To separate consonant from
Consonant, sense from sense.

I think of winter frost,
As I dig on so very slowly now,
Not in English, not in Slovak.

               from ‘In a Slovak Garden' by James Sutherland Smith

James Sutherland-Smith has lived and worked in Serbia and Montenegro through the difficult transitions. Old states fragmented and a new Balkan political landscape emerged. He writes, not as an observer, but from within cultures rebuilding after political and social upheaval. Popeye in Belgrade records the aftershocks of those moral and spiritual earthquakes in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The movements of history play out in private, intimate contexts whose subtleties the poet catches with an ear and eye alert to the nuances of personal and public feeling. Political and social concerns form part of each poem’s texture, as they form part of the invisible fabric of individual lives. Music and the natural world are presences throughout the collection, not as sources of consolation but as expressions of elusive otherness. They persist outside the unstable complexities of human society.

Contents


The Seventies
Popeye in Belgrade
Off-Duty in Belgrade
After a Funeral
Incident in Novi Sad
A Dream in Serbia
Dubrovnik
A Night of Demons
The Clouds of Van Oort
Red Poet
The Little Fiddler

Ornamentation
At Play
A Game
Invitation to a Pig-Killing
A World of Music
Fiddler with Card Players
A Score Settled
Giant Burdock
A Dead Mouse
Reaction
Inspiration
The First Snow of Christmas

A Rite of Spring
Blewits
Comfrey
Making Hay
Watching the Weather
In a Slovak Garden
Spades and Roses
A Slovak Christmas Tree
Curlew
Running
Screech Owls
On Not Reading L’Allegro
The Silences
Cats and Sparrows
The Autumn Laundry
Beyond the Glue Factory
Killing a Sheep
The Barbarian Invasions
Sawston Hall
The Perfect Haircut
Stopover in Washington
Canto for a Romantic Novelist

We Write the Last Chapter First
We Meet the Norton Commander
Places Generals Patton and Montgomery Never Reached
Lorissa’s Oriental Wiles
Cathay or Camay?
Lorissa Reads a Sura
Room At the Top
The Norton Commander Intervenes
Sigman to the Rescue
A Live Tradition
Indian Lovesong
We Look Up at the Heavens
We Look Out to Sea
We Look Elsewhere

Ode from a Nightingale
To Billie Holiday
Nuages
For the End of Time
Three Sighs at the Guan Pass
A Scarlatti Sonata and the Golden Mean
A Middle Aged Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

Piccolo
Rainmakers
Fate Theme
Trombones
A Violin Playing in Cairo
Postcard from Alexandria
Guitar
Exile
Oboe
L’Instrument Aquatique
View of a Double Bass
Harp
Epitaph for a Piano
Obsolescence
Muzak
A Viola Solo
To a Cello Player
Voluntary for the Massacre of the Innocents
Fantasia for Horns

To an Eleven-Year-Old Boy Unable to Speak More
Than Two Words

Notes