Night Mail: Selected Poems

by Novica Tadić

Novica Tadic', born in 1949, has lived most of his life in Belgrade. One of the most respected Yugoslavian poets of his generation, Tadic "weaves poetry whose images are visible and abstract. A labyrinth of masterful short poems." (World Literature Today) Here masterfully translated by Yugoslavian-born poet Charles Simic.

Genres: Poetry

119 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1992

About the author

Novica Tadić was a Serbian poet. He was born in a small village in Montenegro and spent most of his life in Belgrade.

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Novica Tadic has some of the darkest poetry I've encountered. He's so dark, that I placed a more recent collection, Dark Things, on my "Horror" shelf. Night Mail has more range, and is a "best of" effort spanning several collections (1974 - 1990). The translations were done by Charles Simic. Simic doesn't give you much in the info, other than say that Tadic is a master of the short poem. That's a shame, because I would like to know more about this poet, who died in January of last year. What personal history brought forward such darkness? That's a question I wouldn't normally ask, but there were times, while reading this, that I felt Tadic spent considerable (as in too much) time pondering Hieronymous Bosch's Hell panel from the Garden of Earthly Delights. How else to explain this?:

The Mouth of the Maker of Faces

The opulent mouth
Of the Maker of Faces
Has opened

I see
Combs and brushes in it
All kinds of metal hooks
Needles fallen out of lightning
Screwdrivers and pliers
and from the black maw
A mild breeze blowing
While he spreads his lips into two blades
Lengthens them after me
Into a lewd feeler
My escort

Whew! Another reviewer has already pointed to ridiculous compression behind Tadic's Jesus poem. It actually makes Geoffrey Hill look verbose:

Jesus

Jesus
Our Jesus
Our Jesus a pincushion


If you like Plath, at her darkest (and that can be WAY DARK), or Georg Trakl (GOTHIC DARK), Tadic should work for you. There's not a whole lot of Tadic out on the Web, but I did find a few. In particular, I recommend "Antipsalm."

href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Two+Poe... Poems: "Song to the Lamb" and "Antipsalm". (Poetry).

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Macabre, surreal, lovely. A series of short poems selected from Tadic’s earlier collections, presented in exceedingly readable verse (at least in Charles Simic’s translation), yet that doesn’t make them any less inscrutable. There’s a playful surrealism underpinning everything, where Tadic starts with an absurd fictive premise and twists it so hard it breaks by the final line, or just abandons it altogether and closes with a discomfiting juxtaposition. This probably counts as the “soft surrealism” often shat upon by a segment of academic minded poets; so be it. Neither confessional nor fully abstract, it feels speculative, inventive, playful, dark. Whatever it is, it operates on the same frequency I do.

I first stumbled onto these poems flipping randomly through the Vintage Anthology of Contemporary World Poetry, and I’m so glad I did. While I’m still exploring around the margins, from what little I’ve read there’s a good deal of thematic and stylistic kinship with Vasko Popa (also translated by Simic around the same time) and Simic’s own work.

Highly recommended. Sadly out of print, but easy enough to procure from bookfinder, abebooks, or similar sites.

[Jenna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Translator Charles Simic calls Tadic "the true descendant of that other great Serbian original, Vasko Popa." I therefore began reading Night Mail with the (admittedly somewhat unfair) expectation that it would be as delightful as Popa's Homage to the Lame Wolf, a book I absolutely loved when I read it a few years ago.

While it's true that Tadic shares Popa's imaginative breadth and surrealist weirdness, it seems to me that Tadic lacks a quality that Popa possesses in spades: for lack of a better word, I'll call it "heart." Reading Popa's poems left me with an uplifted, transcendent feeling, a feeling of exhilaration, of "wow." In contrast, the insistently dark and gruesome surrealist visions that dominate Tadic's poems just began to feel kinda tedious after a while. Hostel-type horror movies are filled with imaginative and gruesome surrealist visions, too, but they're not how I like to spend my time.

Reading poems like Tadic's "The Mouth of the Maker of Faces" just left me with a vacant "so what?" feeling, like flipping through cable channels late at night at catching a glimpse of one horror film among many:

"The opulent mouth
Of the maker of faces
Has opened

I see
Combs and brushes in it
All kinds of metal hooks
Needles fallen out of lightning
Screwdrivers and pliers
and from the black maw
A mild breeze blowing
While he spreads his lips into two blades
Lengthens them after me
Into a lewd feeler
My escort"

Tadic specializes in writing short poems, rarely more than one page long. But his poems sometimes seemed too short to me: rather than feeling inevitable the way a great ending ought to, the sudden shifts at the ends of his poems sometimes felt rather arbitrary, leaving me questioning, "Would another line have worked better than the one Tadic settled on? Would another word have been more perfect than the one he chose?"

I did enjoy some of the poems in this book. I appreciated how "Night Meditation" and "My First Record" experimented idiosyncratically with structure ("Night Meditation" uses a syllogistic form that is a bit similar to that of Vera Pavlova's "If There Is Something to Desire," but applies it as a means to a different end entirely). "At the Hairdresser" is a poem whose last line successfully brings the poem home with a hammer-like bang:

"At night at the hairdresser's
The angel with bright scissors
And monstrous combs draws near
To the archangel's funnel-like ear:

If God is dead, if he truly fell in
The abyss, let's place instantly
On his empty throne the hairdresser
Who does our hair so well."

A recurring theme in these poems is the blurry line between true prophets and false ones. I feel sure that having an intimate familiarity with the Christian religious tradition would enrich one's reading of Tadic's oeuvre. The contemporary American poet whom Tadic most closely resembles (besides Simic himself) would probably be...Russell Edson? If Edson sets your heart a-pounding, then Tadic probably will, too.

[Russel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesus
Our Jesus
Our Jesus a pincushion

[Mills College Library]

891.8216 T121n 1992