The Taste of Lightning: Selected Poems

The Taste of Lightning is a new selection of poems by Ivan V. Lalic, one of 20th-century Yugoslavia’s most crucial poets. Lalic’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 Lalic, 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 Lalic, 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.

The Taste of Lightning introduces new readers to this grand master of European poetry, whose other books in English are now out of print. And for those who know Lalic’s poetic world, it combines revisions of previously published translations with poems not seen before in English.

The Taste of Lightning traces the whole arc of Lalic’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 Lalic’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 Lalic 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 Lalic’s poetry.

Ivan V. Lalic (1931-1996) was one of former Yugoslavia’s most vital poets. He was also an important translator of poetry; his English translations of his own work appeared in the 1965 inaugural issue of Ted Hughes’ and Daniel Weissbort’s Modern Poetry in Translation. Born and living most of his life in the Serbian capital Belgrade, Lalic is regarded as a grand master of Serbian 20th-century poetry. He went to high school and university in the Croatian capital Zagreb, however, and the Croatian Adriatic - especially around the town of Rovinj, where his family had a house - is a crucial backdrop for many of his poems. Lalic’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’.