Dark Things

Tadic may be the foremost living poet of Serbia: the short introduction from translator and former U.S. poet laureate Simic calls the Belgrade-based Tadic “a poet of the dark night of history,” and recent Serbian history, with its atrocities, its dictators, its victims of retaliatory bombardments, is behind Tadic's sorrowful, anguished short poems. Yet the “dark things” of the titular poem are at once “close and far away,” “stirring in our hearts”: they are less topical than they are spiritual, folkloric, chthonic. The poet is at once perpetrator and casualty, his guilt exceptional and yet widely shared. His settings without contemporary reference, like minimal stage sets, provide backdrops for nightmarish exclamations: “I'm a cross of human flesh/ on which nothing is crucified.” A few poems even bring in vampire legends. But only rarely do Tadic's poems topple over into gothic caricature; more often they measure the depths of a blasted despair, and they gain—for all their individual brevity—cumulative force. Simic translated the Serbian master's earlier poems previously: this volume, selected from verse published in Serbian since 2001, seems certain to get more attention, since Simic himself is now much better known. (July)