Poetry
Нове песме
Not translated into English
Milan Rakić · 1912
Synopsis
The collection opens with a poem of love and disenchantment, and has at its heart a cycle of seven poems on Kosovo: the red peonies of the battlefield, a convent fresco whose eyes have been gouged out, the plain of Gazimestan and the knights of 1389, a medieval nun, an abandoned church, a minaret. Around them are verses on love, death and time, tightly wrought and never raising their voice.
Context
The collection appeared in 1912, the year of the Balkan wars. The Kosovo cycle was written during the years when the author served as consul in a province still under Ottoman rule, and the poem on Gazimestan at once became a kind of anthem, recited during the visits of the author and his friends to the battlefield. The order of the cycle is deliberate: the peony first, the minaret last.
Who it is for
A slim collection of regular verse, without obscurity. It is worth knowing what the field of Kosovo represents for the Serbs, and that the province was then Ottoman.
Prizes and reception
His Kosovo cycle is held to be the finest in Serbian patriotic poetry and marked the renewal of that poetry in the modern era.