Death's Homeland

by Dragan Dragojlovic
translated by Stanislava Lazarevic

Northwestern University Press, 2008
Paper: 978-1-931896-45-0
Library of Congress Classification PG1419.14.R25Z2413 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 891.8215

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Dragan Dragojlović's poetry captures the horror of the civil war and acts of genocide that ravaged his native Yugoslavia. He tells the truth in startling images and expresses the resilience of the human spirit even in the midst of despair. As he asks in one poem, "What are we to do with so much grief?"

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

DRAGAN DRAGOJLOVIĆ graduated and obtained a masters degree in Economics at Belgrade University. He has published 18 books in the Serbian language, and 13 books in foreign languages, including 4 in English, and has won several literary awards. He is currently the Director of the Ivo Andrić Foundation in Belgrade.

REVIEWS

"To convey the struggle to remain human in the midst of atrocious violence requires a stoic honesty about the powerful pull of hatred and despair; in these poems we feel that pull, but we also come to inhabit the poet's refusal to capitulate, his adamantly lyrical commitment to the individual human soul. These poems are as welcome and heart-breaking as birdsong between bombardments. A reader can only be grateful."

—Richard Hoffman, author of Gold Star Road

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"These indelible lyric poems of extremity bear the spiritual and cognitive shattering of loss—the loss that is war, that is death, the loss of what is beloved and love itself, hope, identity, community, promise, homeland, physical rudiments of existence—in shell flash visions where the dead are looking upon the living in disbelief that they have ever existed, where the stars come down to the trenches at night and cannot labor their way back into the heavens in the morning. What is and what is not, what happened and what will, fall into and out of each other like political boundaries whiplashing across maps.

Among the things this work has to teach Americans is that the point of even the lyric poem is not to provide a stage for the unique sensibility of the poet but to allow us to know the trauma of which we are in fact the agentts, the 'timeless and universal' dispensation of might, 'where spring, too, had hidden away / fearing to set off / across meadows and woods, / to the realm of death.'"

—Linda McCarriston, author of Little River

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"These indelible lyric poems of extremity bear the spiritual and cognitive shattering of loss—the loss that is war, that is death, the loss of what is beloved and love itself, hope, identity, community, promise, homeland, physical rudiments of existence—in shell flash visions where the dead are looking upon the living in disbelief that they have ever existed, where the stars come down to the trenches at night and cannot labor their way back into the heavens in the morning. What is and what is not, what happened and what will, fall into and out of each other like political boundaries whiplashing across maps. Among the things this work has to teach Americans is that the point of even the lyric poem is not to provide a stage for the unique sensibility of the poet but to allow us to know the trauma of which we are in fact the agents, the 'timeless and universal' dispensation of might, 'where spring, too, had hidden away / fearing to set off / across meadows and woods, / to the realm of death.'" —Linda McCarriston, author of Little River

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

STONE OF WOE
Stone of woe
There is no one left
Before the unchangeable
Early snow on the mountains
The blind guide
What befell us
Under death's wing
Soot and ruins
The landscape of dawn
Merciless daybreak
Sins may have been expiated

FRUIT OF HELL
Fruit of hell
The living and the dead
Confirmed news
A painter's monologue
The day will be over
The sun above a naked forest
The space of infinity
Ruins
I know what Hell is
In spite of everything
Let the war be damned
Magnificent emptiness
War talk
Words instead of forgiveness

THE CREEPING IN OF EVIL
Vienna and Deutschland
Servants of their own hatred
Earth's bitter bread
Is this me?
The secret of death
God's love
Lords of evil
God Interest

WARRIORS
In the waste wind
Dead warriors
Trenches
In the underground shelter
A brief announcement
Ready for death
Celestial warriors
Winter's might
The earth will turn into desert
Only one star
Before death

THE REALM OF THE DEAD
The realm of the dead
Dreams from another time
Wormwood and rosemary
Gifts
Kingdom of the dead
The message
The secret
I will cry in Heaven
Posthumous flute
Across the moonlit garden
An unfamiliar dead man

GLORY ETERNAL
Glory eternal

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