The Taste of Lightning

A remarkable poet… Although he has many lyrical poems on themes of love and landscape, the most distinctive part of his work relates to the ebb and flow of historical conquest and change on the northern shores of the Mediterranean… He broods over darkly crucial events like the fall of Byzantium…and delivers interesting questions about the ambiguities of memory.

– Edwin Morgan * PBS Bulletin, on A Rusty Needle *

A poetry is real as anything “original” shines in many of the translations… Far from being ingrowing reveries or blurred and plangent meditations on the lost, these lyrics are ablaze with successes of metaphor… They share a pungent ghostliness that is…their most distinctive quality.

– Michael Bird * PN Review, on The Works of Love *

Ivan V. Lalić

Lalić’s poems combine a warm sensuality with a love for the natural world, vivid images and similes with thoughtful reflection, here-and-now experience with a backdrop of deep history. In Celia Hawkesworth’s words, his work ‘crackles with brilliant, arresting imagery forged by the heat of concentrated thought and, above all, it breathes with compassion and humanity’.