Death’s Homeland, by Dragan Draojlovic

-Trans. Stanislava Lazarevic´. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press, 2008

The plain fact is that there is poetry after Auschwitz, however wounded it may be. An honest poem today must at least have windows open to the never-ending tragedy of our times. But windows imply a house, secure, protected, from which we look out. Dragan Dragojlovic´’s recent collection, Death’s Homeland looks out from no house and says so right from the start:

And again,

Even the voice in these poems is nearly no voice, or a voice searching for itself:

Such mercy as the poems utter comes from afar: “the good old sun / that gives me warmth” [“Before the Unchangeable”], “a fragment of the moon [that] / hangs over the shredded forest” (“The Landscape of Dawn”). In “The Sun Above a Naked Forest, a single ray of sunlight breaking through “smoke and shooting” and bitter cold brings hope that “the forest will put out new leaves / to hide this death.” Yet even distant heavenly props are dubious: “The heart goes on counting / the rosary of the stars / that have betrayed us” (“Merciless Daybreak”).

Against such desolation, even heaven can offer only tears:

In the end, such comfort as we can take from Death’s Homeland is that, in the midst of war’s horrors, this suffering human voice can still be heard. And in hearing it we are brought into intimacy with the suffering of both the people and the landscape, thus affirming human solidarity in a wounded land that comes close to destroying it. From this we draw heart.

In Death’s Homeland Dragolovic´ reaffirms the necessity of a poetry of suffering in the midst of which the poet utters unquenchable life and compassion:

So must we all pray, against the again and again and again of human brutality, lifting our own “Never again, never again.”