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Biographical note: Richard Berengarten was born in London into a family of musicians. He has lived in Italy, Greece, Serbia, Croatia and the USA. He now lives in Cambridge, where he is a Bye-Fellow at Downing College. A former Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, he has published more than 25 books.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844714391
ISBN: 9781844714391
Author: Richard Berengarten
Title: Under Balkan Light
Series: Salt Modern Poets
Product class: BB
Language: eng
Audience: General/trade
BIC subject category: CTCH1
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Pub date: 23-Nov-08
Extent: 176pp
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight: 264 gms
Supplier: Gardners Books
Supplier: Ingram Book Group
Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability: NP
Price: GBP 14.99
Price: USD 26.95
Rights: World
See also
Richard
Berengarten
For the Living
Richard
Berengarten
The Blue Butterfly
Richard
Berengarten
The Manager
Richard
Berengarten
In a Time of Drought
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Short
description/annotation: Set in the crumbling ruins of Yugoslavia, this book presents a vision of the Balkans that flinches from neither brutality nor beauty but honours truth, dignity and hope. The book starts with a tour-de-force, the long poem ‘Do vidjenje Danitsé’, and continues with a series of memorial tablets for victims of Jasenovac concentration camp. The book includes a sequence in memory of the Serbian, Yugoslav and Mediterranean poet, Ivan V. Lalić.
Main description: Set in the crumbling ruins of Yugoslavia, this book presents a vision of the Balkans that flinches from neither brutality nor beauty but honours truth, dignity and hope. The book starts with a tour-de-force, the long poem ‘Do vidjenje Danitsé’, and continues with a series of memorial tablets for victims of Jasenovac concentration camp. The book includes a sequence in memory of the Serbian, Yugoslav and Mediterranean poet, Ivan V. Lalić.
Under Balkan Light forms the final part of his Balkan Trilogy and is published together with the first two parts, The Blue Butterfly and In a Time of Drought. It is also the fifth volume in the Salt series of his Selected Writings.
Richard Berengarten used to be known as RICHARD BURNS. With the publication of this book, he now repossesses the family name of his father, the cellist and saxophonist Alexander Berengarten.
Table of contents:
Editorial Note
Acknowledgements
1 Do vidjenja Danitse
2 By the Banks of the Sava
3 Under Balkan Light
mi dva
Seagull’s wings
Notes from three cities
On the qualities of light in the Balkans
Poem at the Autumn Equinox
Fragment: on The Sepharad
In war: June 4, 1943
Memorial tablet for Lili Boehm
Memorial tablet for a slave labourer
Poem at the Spring Equinox
Poem for my infant daughter at Mileševa Monastery
Poem for a very small child
Father to small child
Borderers
By the Danube, Zemun
To Zora
Guests
4 The Voice in the Garden
Whose voice?
Who can I ask
The voice in the garden
In the mirror
Hill of the Fountains
The stork
The garment of death
Poem for Andjelka
Ned Goy has gone out
To write simply again
Tonight the war ended
I dreamed I slept
Bogomil
Night, Summer
Memory, Summer
Silken thread: gypsy’s song
Silken thread: poet’s pages
The face of light
The voice of light
Harvest
The man I met on the hill
5 On the death of Ivan V. Lalić
This door I can’t unlatch
What did you mean by it?
One day you wake up
Are you there?
Even when you lived
Nobody dies too late
Lords of the far side
The unready ones
Not the dead but Death
Nothing, hollow ring
One iota of respect?
Tissue of waterfalls
From the other shore
Aristocrats of silence
Dictated by a man who is dead
Backgrounded among these
The bowl of light fills and empties
6 Things in their miracles
Pure blue, and cool
For what it is
Things in their miracles
Unseeable gate through air
Finger of life, finger of the word
7 The Apple
Recalling Šumarice
When Death’s door was locked
Topčider, October
The apple
Woman reading
Faith
Postscript and Notes
Postscript
Notes View excerpt as PDF:  Click here to view a sample (96 KB)
Excerpt from book:
Father to small child
I am your tent, a membrane made
of tissue ribbed and wrapped in flesh,
and thoughts and dreams, a finer mesh
on which imprints of stars are laid.
Under the storm I toss and turn,
under the wind I flap and sway,
you fill me as light fills the day,
under the sun I swell and burn.
Rest in me, gypsy soul, in calm.
I am the rest upon your way,
I am your nest though the trees sway.
Come to no tears or pain or harm.
The soul is vaporous mist, sea haze,
fistfuls of water, light, and praise,
sunflecks at noon, heart's ease
and evenings under palm trees.
Unpublished endorsement: Richard Berengarten’s Yugoslav trilogy is an important work in recent English poetry in that it explicitly places itself in the European poetic mainstream. Francis Jones Unpublished endorsement: Berengarten is one of the major poets writing in English in the early years of the new millennium. There is no other voice like his. Watch out for him. Anthony Rudolf Unpublished endorsement: Berengarten is a poet who undertakes the underworld journey, and hears voices from Hades, as poets concerned with fundamental issues of love and death always have, and always will. Jeremy Hooker Unpublished endorsement: Even readers who are not inclined to seek “big themes” in literature are likely to respond to the beauty of complexity in Berengarten’s work, especially those familiar with the Balkans. ANDRIJA MATIć Review quote: These books not only confirm Berengarten’s reputation as a significant European writer but, in their handling of universal themes, herald his status as a great poet. ALEKSANDER PETROV |
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