The Master of Insomnia

72 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews these waters in the future. In the elegy “Milonga for Dule Basarić,” his friend recalls ferrying people over the Sava or onto the river island beach. The poem “Turmoil” speaks of how the year is expected to be dry, both in terms of the weather and in the unsuccessful search for the Serbian Bosnian generals who have to be found for the sanctions on Serbia to end. But life goes on even under the turmoil of a difficult political situation. Spending time with his daughter, Marta, takes precedence over politics. In the second section, he quotes hiswife(alsoapoet,DanicaVukićević) in an epigraph about dresses in “The Goodness of Dresses,” a poem in which an older woman gives away dresses to a younger woman, knowing they’ll fit her better—indirectly speaking of the aging process of women. When we are young we are forgiven for our mistakes, but not when we get older. He alludes to the civil war times in “Milonga for Luka Štoković,” when he remembers “the darkness of the nineties / [he is] drinking with [him] . . . / behind a darkened windowpane of a bar in Vuk Street,” darkened because of the possibility of NATO airstrikes. Section 3 centers on family, with such striking lines as “You greet me then disappear / like the Spanish rhapsodyofFerencLiszt /onmother’skitchen transistor radio.” He criticizes racism when he writes, “the mother, your wife, now a widow / drowns kittens and butterflies / to the shock of my daughter, / wants to lash Roma who beg / and everyone who doesn’t have any food.” In another the speaker no longer knows anyone in his hometown: “no one / to askwhyaclassmatebecameanun/why another hung himself.” The final section is a reflection on the hardships of the 1990s, that with “the end of the sanctions . . . in sight” there is hope. Milošević ends the book with several love poems, remembering innocence, “stealing vinjaks from supermarkets” in “Jazzy,” or when he says in “Who Lived besides Us”: “Only, if hope won’t get away from us one morning / like a lover who cannot stand / that you’d fallen in love with her.” This book ends with hope, an eagerness for the wind to blow the negative past away. Biljana D. Obradović Xavier University of Louisiana Boris A. Novak. The Master of Insomnia: Selected Poems. Aleš Debeljak, intro. Michael Biggins et al., tr. Champaign, Illinois. Dalkey Archive. 2012. isbn 9781564787835 One key to Boris A. Novak’s poetic development over four decades can be found in the closing lines of “Discovering the Everyday”: “I am learning to speak specifically: / not of birds, but of swallows and robins, / not of flowers , but carnations and roses.” In his poems from the 1970s, nouns are most often general, with verbs focusing on process, interactions , especially in images of weaving , and reversals and complements, so that “Truth is always being born at the edge,” “life is translated into still life” (though in an untranslatable pun, it remains “life”) and “in a poem,” the poet “is someone who’s always missing.” These generalizations apply to Novak’s poems until the late 1990s. The poems from The Master of Insomnia (1995), written in response to the Bosnian atrocities, are unusual for a political and cultural activist like Novak in that they deal not with specific incidents and people but with the poet’s emotional response to the general conditions. The major shift to concrete nouns—places, people, things as mundane as an aunt’s collection of dust rags—comes, if the selection is representative, at the end of the last century with a series of love poems, followed by yearning tributes to his parents, his grandfather, and the man who left a safe full not of conventional treasure but of souvenirs celebrating his erotic conquests. The contrast between general and concrete does not imply the superiority of either. The earliest poems, very short, resemble truncated haiku and invite contemplation rather than analysis. A bit later, Novak works in tightly structured forms like the sonnet cycle in which the last line of each poem becomes the first of the next—and the last poem is composed of a reprise of first and last lines. “The

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