Poetry
Bark
Кора
Vasko Popa · 1953
Synopsis
Four cycles of short poems: “Опседнута ведрина”, “Предели”, “Списак”, “Далеко у нама”. A man faces a world without centre or axis, where the absurd, menace and monsters lodge in everyday objects, and he has only his humanity to defend himself with, the one way of finding meaning in nonsense. The phrasing is simple, full of turns of spoken language and the short forms of folklore.
Context
The collection appeared in 1953, a year after Miodrag Pavlović's 87 песама: literary histories see in these two books the “poetic putsch” that ended utilitarian poetry. It received the first Branko Radičević prize awarded for poetry. Its first edition did not yet bear the emblem that marks the author's later books, and the collection opened a body of work of eight books in thirty-eight years.
Who it is for
A slim collection of very short pieces. Nothing in it requires prior knowledge, but one must accept that no poem can be paraphrased.
Prizes and reception
The turning point of postwar Serbian poetry, and the first book of a poet who became the most translated of his generation.