Fading Contact is a middle-period masterwork by the great Serbo-Croat poet who died suddenly at the height of his powers in July 1996. It marks the watershed between the blazing, vivid imagery of his youthful poetry and the measured, complex verse of his later work. A Mediterranean warmth and light suffuses these poems in which he explores in direct language and with scalpel-sharp aptness of image the nature of memory, culture – its fragile continuity – and of existence itself.