Oberlin College Press

Novica Tadic

NIGHT MAIL: SELECTED POEMS (translated by Charles Simic)

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-59-2) cloth $24.95 (ISBN 0-932440-60-6)

"Bruno Schulz said: 'The sublime nature of the divine order...can be rendered only by the power of human negation.' He was speaking of Kafka's feel for the boundaries of the human and the divine. Tadic has the same feel. He composes anti-poems, anti-psalms, anti-prayers. Such complexity in poems that are almost exclusively very short! In my view, he is one of the most original and interesting poets today."
--Charles Simic

"Oscillating between traditional and modern, realistic and fantastic, evil and good, Tadic weaves poetry whose images are visible and abstract. A labyrinth of masterful short poems."
--World Literature Today

Charles Simic is also the translator of Vasko Popa's Homage to the Lame Wolf.

NIGHT SONNET

Great wise night
Under the city walls
You pull me out of
The monster's socket

Lead me crazed
Out on the empty square
So I may walk again
Around myself

And see once more
That I'm still
A living creature

Son of thunder and smoke
The lost son
The solitary, generously salted--Nobody

--Novica Tadic
translated by Charles Simic