The Sun King by Conor O'Callaghan

reviews cannot get pregnant.” The second section, “Ave Patria,” returns to Serbian history and events from the perspective of an emigrant who dreams of returning to his idealized homeland but, when he does, cannot find anyone to communicate with and returns to the US disappointed. In the section “From Spring into Winter,” he observes nature and different seasons, followed with a section of love poems for an unidentified love, presumably his deceased wife, whom he misses. He recalls Mozart’s “Eine kleine Nachtmusik,” which they listened to when they first met. In the section “Memories ,” he returns to childhood, his old house, his father playing a melody for him on a violin, and the passing of his mother. The final, longest section, “Images and Occasions,” is filled with a variety of unrelated images such as a dog who mourns for his master, a captain during war, a dolphin dying from a plastic bag, a tango played on the radio, and a dying man who gives his books away to his friends. We don’t know which books these poems came from or if any of these poems are new, but together they provide a picture of an emigrant poet who wishes to make a final statement about his writing career. Vasa Mihailović still longs for the ideal yet is satisfied with the choices he has made in life, a life filled with images and poetry. Biljana D. Obradović Xavier University of Louisiana Conor O’Callaghan. The Sun King. Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Wake Forest University Press. 2013. isbn 9781930630673 Conor O’Callaghan’s The Sun King is a rich volume that immediately stuns the reader with its seamless interweaving of a contemporary idiom— the language of here and now—with a lyricism that reaches us through strata of literary history. O’Callaghan is capable of combining high and low registers in a way that very few writers are, seemingly without strain. He revels in history and contemporaneity , the high and the low, without feeling compelled to make a choice between them, or at least to choose between the identity of elegist for a bygone world or celebrant of the new. O’Callaghan is both. He rarely indulges in plangency and is as sparing with his emotional effects as he is generous with his melodic and rhythmic effects. The occasional self-reflexive gestures 68 worldliteraturetoday.org Ondjaki Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret Stephen Henighan, tr. Biblioasis Ondjaki’s zany novel manages to tell a thought-provoking story without taking itself too seriously. The book is full of interesting characters who add vivacity to the story of a boy’s quest to keep his grandmother safe from a supposed Soviet threat. Full of energy, Ondjaki’s quirky writing style shines a revealing light on people and locale. Gregory Norminton Thumbnails Vagabond Voices / Dufour Gregory Norminton paints a picture of the world in a fresh, experimental way in his lively collection of short stories. He travels the world and explores new interpretations of history, challenging the standards of storytelling without failing to convey a complete narrative. Nota Bene in these poems are clever, fun, and avoid ponderousness. Time itself, as in so much modern poetry, is a topic of fascination and bewilderment; but O’Callaghan is a virtuoso poet, and his temporalities are also virtuosic, twinkling out of sight behind tales half-imagined and half-true, or proving themselves malleable to the poet’s hands: as he writes, “This world . . . We get older & find it less hard.” The world’s laws— of temporality, of gravity, of identity —are not so steadfast or “hard” as we may assume; in Seamus Heaney’s words, whatever is given can always be reimagined. O’Callaghan takes this dictum to heart. We catch ourselves wondering if his reality is simply more interesting than ours and feel eager to experience this superabundance of sounds, sights, events, emotions, among which the poet lives. We may also recall the glee of a very different poet, Louis MacNeice , at the drunkenness of things being various. O’Callaghan’s project is different from MacNeice’s, but the exuberance of the poet’s intonation, parallel to the profusion of stimuli and emotions that

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