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Popeye in BelgradeJames Sutherland Smith![]() 10% off
Categories: 21st Century, War writings
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry Publisher: Carcanet Press Available as: Paperback (96 pages) (Pub. Nov 2008) 9781857549690 £9.95 £8.96
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 |
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