Charles Simic

We never even felt our share of the eternal in what was our life: the moments from which these bursts of activity and lethargy are made up, the similarity between here and there in inner and outer space. We exchanged life for its semblance, the object for its shadow, the visible coin for the invisible riches whose origins are unknown and whose value is ambiguous: the body for a wee...

It may well be that the most interesting literature of this century cannot be subsumed under the broad label of Modernism or be said to have originated in the great literary centres, but was actually the work of outsiders and mavericks, starting with Kafka, who created something without precedent from a mix of native and foreign traditions. The poetry of Vasko Popa, who died in 1991, is of that eccentric company. He was the best-known Yugoslav poet of this century, and the most translated: his Selected Poems were first published by Penguin in 1969, as part of its series of modern European poets. Popa was then usually grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, two other astonishingly original East European poets, whose work was plainly unlike anything being written in Britain and the United States. Encountering in Popa an exotic blend of avant-garde poetry and popular folklore, the foreign reader tends to think that this is what all poets from that part of the world must be like. In fact, no other Serbian poet sounds like Popa. He was both the product of his time and place and the inventor of his own world.

I was drumming on my bald head with a pencil, Making a list of my sins. Well, not exactly. I was in bed smoking a cigar and reading In the Sunday papers about a Jesus-lookalike Who won a pie-eating contest in Texas.

Is there some unsuspected dignity to this foolishness? I inquired of the large stain on the ceiling. Is someone about to slip a note under my door Summoning...