Anxious Moments

Written over a year before civil war broke out in the former republic of Yugoslavia, this introduction to English-speaking readers of a poet highly acclaimed in his homeland cannot help but be read in light of recent events. With a haunting sense of urgency and prophecy, the speaker searches ``the depths of memory'' for ``destroyed villages you wanted to forget.'' Indistinct himself, the speaker's landscape is peopled with shadows. A cigarette butt, a littered street, an open window or a doorstep suddenly take on epic proportions. The dominoes children play with are ``made from the bones of animals.'' Rain inexplicably seems to presage an earthquake. Absorbed within these highly evocative landscapes, man at first seems to be at war with nature; as page piles on page, we begin to realize it's man at war with man, with nature caught in the crossfire. But man does have a choice, Debeljak tells the reader, in what also seems an attempt to convince himself. While these seven lyrical prose-poem sequences have a travel theme, the emotional climax comes in the book's last three sections: here men can stay or go; each is responsible for his own fate. Readers, by this time hanging on the speaker's every word, are left mercilessly on the precipice. (Mar.)