Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia - Softcover

Smith, Ken

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852242833 ISBN 13: 9781852242831

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1994

Synopsis

This international anthology has been assembled in a matter of days as an immediate if inadequate response to the suffering in Bosnia. What else is there to say about Bosnia? What more can anyone do?
Klaonica is the poets' attempt to do or say something. It includes poems by many leading writers, some already published in The Independent's series Bosnia Poems. The poems are baffled, helpless, heartfelt, heartbreaking, angry, tender, grieving. Useless too: except that readers should find some comfort, some hope, in this book. And the book is published to raise funds for Bosnian relief.
Klaonica is the Serbo-Croat word for slaughterhouse, abattoir, butchery, shambles, and describes conditions in that doomed country after over a year of vicious warfare that includes massacre, rape, pillage, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, the destruction of towns and villages, churches and mosques, and ultimately of a state and a whole society. Whatever the rights and wrongs of this conflict - and there are more wrongs than rights to it - it amounts to genocide, in Europe, here at the end of the twentieth century. The Bosnians are starving. They have planted no crops, they have used up all their stores and savings, they have no fat left, and winter is coming. Over and above the depredations of a three-sided war, they need food and medicines. All proceeds from the sale of this book will be given to Feed the Children and other organisations seeking to alleviate the suffering in Bosnia.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

"Klaonica" is the Serbo-Croat word for slaughterhouse--what Bosnia has become. In this anthology, poems by writers from Sarajevo and around the world take form as laments, elegies and dirges. Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky and Ted Hughes are included, but it is the work of lesser-known poets that stands out. Describing the bombing of his city, Sarajevo poet Marko Vesovic writes, "All night long the angels with pipes fell out of the sky / the awls dipped into poison pierced our ear-drums." In "Concentration Camp" Miljenko Jergovic avers, "In special moments you suddenly feel one should not have talked of socrates / One should have talked of pigs." Poems written in support of war victims can also startle and astound. Welsh poet R.S. Thomas asks, "What is it to be punished / for something you have not / done? We know it. / . . . We were born to learn / we are invisible." American writer Christopher Middleton observes, "The blackbird once believed / He cranked the sun up with his song / . . . Now the warlords crank and crank / Only graves come up." And in a simple yet chilling untitled poem, London writer Ian Breakwell limns the chaotic modern world's means and methods of assimilating tragedy--and doing nothing about it. His rhythm is that of a radio deejay who in a single riff signals summer weather, a Bosnian girl fighting for her life in a British hospital, the scum found at the bottom of teacups, and the music of Billy Joel. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

The title of this anthology "made in whatever measure of solidarity is possible," say its editors, "with the victims of this most vicious of wars" is the Croat and the Serbian word for slaughterhouse, butchery, and shambles. Contributed by poets from throughout Europe, the poems themselves present the dead, wounded, and orphaned, the weary and the dispossessed of Bosnia, that Yugoslavian fragment in which one person kills and another makes jokes in the face of war's despair. In them we see the elderly man shot while feeding pigeons, the old woman at her son's grave, the survivors carrying with them ghosts from past world horrors, and those sentenced to lifelong memories of this most recent series of slaughters and tortures--people whose faces "map the long year of terror." No single side is taken herein. Instead of partisan pleading, Klaonica seeks to render palpable the human spirit of all the Bosnians and, by extension, all humanity. Whitney Scott

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 1852242833
• ISBN 13: 9781852242831
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128
• Editor: Smith Ken, Benson Judi