May we introduce...

A poem by Duška Vrhovac often has the quality of an amulet: open it up, and inside you will find a secret and a memento. In a small space, she can catch and hold the moment, as well as its whole range of echoes. Many of her poems have an easy conversational surface, yet she can make what looks like a polished pebble open and grow in the mind like a seed. In Serbo-Croat, she often makes coinages of her own, and relishes the full sonoric and metaphorical resonances of her mother language. And, firmly rooted in her own experience, she never overstates but always affirms her heritage and her consciousness, which are inescapably those of a modern Yugoslav woman. "I don't put my life into my poems, "she has said. "My life is for the living. What goes into my poems is what can’t be lived in my life." This compex idea irradiates all her work. The poems are finely patterned miniatures, "inklings", in all senses of the word: creatures living and breathing through ink, instants at once trapped in time yet freed from it, glimpses and aperçus, intimations and recognitions.

Richard Burns, I WEAR MY SHADOW INSIDE ME
(Poems by Duška Vrhovac, Forest Books, London 1991)

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