Opis
Review from The Book Beat Backroom “I arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden”
https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/2022/01/02/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-23/
This well-arranged (as opposed to chronological) sequence of poems from across decades of Babacic’s (b. 1965) published works in Slovenia marks the poet’s first anthology published in English, highlighting themes that have remained consistent obsessions over time.
The shorter pieces are epigramic, usually only a single sentence/stanza, often beginning with the phrase “Sometimes you,” such as the Bukowski-like “Sometimes you go all the way / even if you’ve lost your way” and “Sometimes / you clench / the fist / in which / you’d bring / flowers.” (Cf. Bukowski’s “You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense.”)
The topics often cover some variation on the theme of alienation from a culture that embraces faceless, mechanical impersonalism in exchange for access to cash. For instance, “A Green Land” begins like this: “There’s a manic / depression of economy, / a psychosis of taking away / heartlessly, / a manic depression / of constructive engineering, / a depression of graves / never in short supply.” The opening to “The Body Scent” reads like an Eastern European cross between Rainer Fassbinder and Simon Hanselmann’s Megg and Owl: “The sun has risen above the Golovec and breathed through / my room. / The state would call it the sun of freedom. With slow and / drowsy gestures / I crawl toward my pants, thinking whether I should eat today / or get fucked-up.”
Babacic writes the kind of poetry people who usually don’t like poetry like: The words are familiar, the images direct and concrete, and writer’s life is also one in which diligence and decency have few rewards.
