Dinner with Fish and Mirrors

Ivana Milankov is one of Serbia's best-known poets whose poems question themselves as much as they question the world around them. Distances in space and time are reduced to the size of a line break as the poet searches for meaning in experience; despite this, however, it is a surprisingly transparent poetry, where a world is created in each poem, holding our attention through an underlying drama of reason and feeling. Milankov's poetry allows us to glimpse a modernism that draws part of its reference from the presence of the Roman Empire and surrounding ancient civilisations of the Middle East. In this outstanding translation by Zorica Petrovic and James Sutherland-Smith, we are dazzled by an imagery whose structure and development confounds our expectations.