Southern Barbarians by John MateerThe West

hUHIH JohnMateer. SouthernBarbarians. Sydney, Australia. Giramondo. 2011.95 pages. Aus$24. isbn 978-1-920882-58-7 . TheWest: Australian Poems 1989-2009.Fremantle, Australia. Fremantle Press(IPG,distr.). 2010.152 pages.$24.95. isbn 978-1-921361-86-9 JohnMateerrepresents the most recentreincarnation of the international poet,a post-expat literary explorer,perpetualstudent,and cultural chameleon (see WLT,Sept. 2011, 24). Born in South Africa, raised thereand in Canada, and basing himself outofAustralia since 1989, whenheturned eighteen years old,Mateerhas traveled and publishedworldwide ,and thesetwo bookscontinue his pattern ofaestheticexploration framedwithin thesociocultural landscapesofhis travel. Southern Barbarians offersan alternate history of theexpansion of thePortuguese empirethrough Africa, America, Asia,and Australia .ThePortuguese werenicknamed "southern barbarians" by theJapanese , and theircolonialexploits werecharacterized bytheir saudade, the traditionallyuntranslatable variety ofmelancholy longing they claim.Mateer channels Pessoafrom his epigraph("I writeto forget") forward, inhissections "Saudades, TheHumanism ofFriends," which catalogsfriends by name,and in thecollection's otherfivesections. Mateer's poemscontain a powerful tandem ofintrinsic questioning and relentless curiosity. The former is succinctly exemplified in the last lineofhispoem"OntheTrain from Cascais to Lisbon":"Where am I? or,beingthepoet,WhoamJ?"He readily incorporates historical detail andbitsofPortuguese languagein a literary cannibalism reminiscent of thecontemporary literary traditions ofPortugal's former colonies. In thehandsofa lesserpoet, thesepoems could easily end in simplebarbarianism - in exploitationor agenda-driven drivel - but Mateeris consummately graceful, that rareforeigner capableofa multilateral empathy, a barbarianin, as BrianCastrowrites inhisintroduction ,the word's etymological sense:"onewhoselanguage denotes a different modeofspeech."He's a medium for thevoicesofthe" perfect nobodies " he praisesin poemslike "Translators areAngels," "Fadista," and"TheHoney-Gatherer." TheWest collects twenty years of Mateer's Australianpoems work thatdirectly engages with thepoet'schosenhome,and especiallywithitswestern region. The collection, likeSouthern Barbarians , exemplifies Mateer'ssignature perspective ,which MartinHarrison calls"regional onlyas a question of conscious choice, conscious perception ."TheWest is an idealcompaniontoSouthern Barbarians ,similar in toneand mode,whether itsnarratoris reading at thedoctor's office ("The Message"),observing alleywaydrugdeals ("TheDrugScene"), or attending festivalreadingsby aboriginal writers ("ToJack Davis"). Againand again,Mateertranscends categorization; buthiswork's brilliance extends beyond that resistance , with a fine-tuned, pensive lyricismcapableofdistilling hiscuriosityintomorethanmereprobing , andhisprobing into more than mere intellectual exercise, asinthis excerpt from his"Argument" witha lizard, fromThe West:"Could stillhave beenthinking / our language, my being, islike/a legless lizard, word appendages/ defunct in thisnew terrain, / whenon thepromontory a metre-long / goannastopped me. . . . //Itssnake-face openedjawsto silence. //lambeing told something ." In Mateer'swork,so are his readers. DavidShook LosAngeles Bratislav R. Milanovic. Doors in a Meadow. Biljana D.Obradovic, tr. Lewiston , NewYork. Edwin Mellen. 2010. ix+ 97pages.$99.95. isbn 978-0-77341462 -4 In thisbilingualeditionof Vrata u Polju,awardedSerbia'sProsveta award in 1999,BiljanaObradovic faithfully renders Milanovic's long lines,preserves wherepossiblehis alliterative patterns, and carefully selects theEnglish wordsthat functionas powerful signsthroughout thevolume.The voiceofthiscollection - written post-Bosnian War and before, during, and just after theNATObombings ofMilanovic's birthcity,Aleksinac, and current home,Belgrade, in spring1999 is both haunted and haunting. Yet unlikethe poems of Novica Tadic,withtheirdarkgrotesques, 72 1 World Literature Today

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