The Taste of Lightning

The Taste of Lightningis a new selection of poems by Ivan V. Lali, one of 20th-century Yugoslavia's most crucial poets. Lali's poetry is alive with seeing and feeling the world a world of sun and wind, water and fire. He is also a poet of love a love for his wife Branka that 'matures like wine' over the decades. From adolescence, through young adulthood, to the onset of old age, where 'We are twin foci of the same ellipse... Which links two other foci: death and love.'

But for Lali, the seen and the felt need to be held in memory if they are to last beyond the instant. This means putting them into words, in speech or a poem, though doing so distances us from the raw freshness of experience: 'Images I barter for the right to pronounce them, / Names I slip as a bribe to time'. Memory, for Lali, is also cultural. Many of his poems speak about Yugoslavia's Eastern and Western heritages. About his native Serbia's history and landscape, and its roots in Byzantium and ultimately in Ancient Greece. But also the seascapes and culture of the Croatian Adriatic, and of Italy.

TheTaste of Lightningintroduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lali's poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.

TheTaste of Lightningtraces the whole arc of Lali's poetic career. From the directness of his early work in the 1950s, which emerged from the trauma of a wartime boyhood. Through the rich imagery and startlingly apt similes of his mature verse. But it also charts another voice, thoughtful and meditative, that gradually grows more prominent. This voice finally reflects, just before Lali's death in 1996, on what God's purpose might be in a world wounded by personal and national tragedy: 'may he forgive my fear / That he created me, as the book says, in his own image'.

Francis R. Jones, the book's editor and translator, knew Lali well, and has worked with his poems for almost five decades. Of Jones's 15 translation prizes to date, five were awarded for his versions of Lali's poetry.

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.

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.

Ivan V. LaliLali'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'.

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