Name: Ο συλλέκτης των Κυριακών
Rating: 4.29 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9786185463847

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June 1, 2020

there are no capital letters: Review of Dead Letter Office by Marko Pogacar

“there is one bar in Zagreb, and we stick to it,” writes Marko Pogacar (“Archdiocese Chronicles,” Dead Letter Office 74).
“’Where are you from?’ asked the young Flemish photographer.
“’Zagreb,’ I said.
‘And where’s that?’ he said casually, chewing gum” (Ugresic 13). Thus begins “Refugee,” the short chapter that starts American Fictionary (2019) by Dubravka Ugresic, originally published as Have A Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream (1994). It was written in the middle of the Yugoslavian War of the 1990s. Dead Letter Office (2020) is the new book of poems by Croatian writer Marko Pogacar who was born in 1984, the year Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics, posing in the eyes of the IOC narrative as paragon of inter-ethnic and religious harmony. “Sarajevo in the spring of 1995 resembled the inner circle of Dante’s Hell,” writes American war correspondent Chris Hedges; “Serb shells hurled bits of iron fragmentation, tearing bodies to pieces” (War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning 3). Pogacar’s poetry slices you, presents fragments; it is post-Balkan War, post-Syria, post-Sudan, post-Yemen poetry that evokes “History” as “a forest fire, that’s when the forest burns./
the trees are done then
except we don’t know it yet (Pogacar 72).
Reading Pogacar’s densely thicketed poetry is like brushing through a dense forest; it is dark, yet incisively articulated. Engaging readers, its sharp sentences slice like spruce needles, or the sudden open space of a clearing, illuminated by slivers of sunlight. Now and again we catch the acrid smoke of the forest fire; now and again we are cloistered within a suffocating dark forest, trying to push through its branches and limbs, as if to find a space where we might discover a spring to sate our thirst, extinguish the fire.
Reading Dead Letter Office is like drinking at the bar in Tarkovsky’s pub scene in Stalker (1979), a sepia-toned arid world gutted by history’s most impersonal forces:
the city then compresses, the whole city into one dirty window,
like a star into a black hole, like a dirty tissue into a pocket.

and all who walk with nothingness in their teeth, all with
their fear under tongues and a hand in cold hands,
all saints, bakers, secretaries and revolutionaries, pregnant ones, all
of them fast-frozen, watch –
It is a darker world, even if a lake sits in the center. The three sections of the book seem to offer a kind of trinity or triptych, but one that is more Hieronymus Bosch than Catholic in spirit:
Metamorphosis
Where are you? I sensed your shadow under my feet,
For days sensed the shadow. to the north,
over dance floors, desolate dim rooms, in the darkness of an orange
in every handshake, coffee mug, every spam folder that very shadow:
and you nowhere to be found.

lit by the lantern of the world I walk
home to pour that into a twisted tongue (Dead Letter Office 37).
The metamorphosis promised by the title slips into “the tongue rogue and silent . . . /and the night is desperate/the optical cables cut, cell phone carriers on strike,/and I don’t know what to do with the news.” The poet and his tongue are haunted by shadows, the shadows of a history that encroach and silence from all directions even as communication lines are cut. At the end of the book, it’s as if the poet is waiting like a tree in this burned forest, waiting for the muse to arrive that would sing a metamorphosis into new forms of life:
Waiting for the Song
You lie down and wait for the song. still.
like a sly glue-coated
branch waiting for a bird.
The muses of history have inhabited this poetry, cut short its style. Lines freeze into waiting, winter freezes over prospects for life, fog obscures; the poet and world divided by border glass that enforces waiting:
outside the winter bites. blood freezes,
skin tightens the back, the wind belts and branches
of oaks scrape the rapids in the fog of windows.
that’s all you hear and see. you know between
you and the world stands the glass, that nothing
can land on you. still you lie and wait for the song.
you wait for it.
Except to start his poems, Pogacar never uses capital letters; it’s as if they’ve been drained of their significance, norms of language stripped away, bankrupted by war and brutality. The conventions of communication that society relies upon have broken down, though the sentences cohere. In fact, the sentences are sharp, the images dense, and in this sense Pogacar’s poetry saturates the reader with a world that overwhelms, history imposing itself at all times on consciousness and individual as well as social life. Density and frequency of images piles up as one reads through poem by poem; entering Dead Letter Office is to enter a realm buffeted by the winds that caught in the wings of Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History: “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is brewing in Paradise; it has got caught his wings“ (Benjamin Illuminations 257). There is a raw beauty to this realm, these sentences; they express our world, not only the Balkan one, but the global one haunted by conflicts more terrible for their regionalism, how frequently they’re shunted to the side, human costs forgotten while the world rushes on.
The translation of these poems is rendered beautifully by Andrea Jurjevic, a poet and translator also born in the former Yugoslavia like Pogacar. Her sensitive work gives imaginative expression to difficult syntax, even in phrases that appear to lose their grammatical grip:
the time of broken teeths, body soft as a turd.
I know I can’t say teeths, still I don’t know what to do with myself.

the horizon shrinks, afternoons become unbearable.
leaves, a carpaccio of memories, pass into a universal earth archive.

naked branches comb the stars, trams sorely squirm,
in silence. black nights for hearts, in the mornings southern eclipse.
I feel cashier windows tremble, tow trucks left in the grass;
holidays of former countries hum. somewhere there’s still blood (“Archdiocese Chronicles,” Dead Letter Office 74).
The humor that laces these poems is leashed by history’s blunt force, and the Dead Letter Office expressed in the title haunts the living and the dead, the enduring abandonment of “minor wars” skirmished worldwide since 1945. The poems here are haunted by the invisibility rendered in Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys (1990). By Soviet policy, dead soldiers’ bodies were shipped home in zinc boxes at night:
We have this image of the soldier returning home in 1945, loved and respected by all. Naïve, a bit simple-minded, with his heavy army belt, asking nothing but victory and to go home. But these soldiers back from Afghanistan are something else – (Alexievich 35).
The beauty in these poems is palpable; the news they carry haunts us all. Like the lake at the center of this book’s three-part structure, the poems seem to offer benediction to slake thirst. Yet there is an aridity to the whole offering, despite the density of the language, as if its forest has been thoroughly scorched by fire. The lake dries up and the poet retreats into silence and waiting. The reader is left with these haunted lines that confront us with the blunt force of history and its endless abandonment and forgetting:
I dreamt I evaporated. my topic silenced other
topics and then disappeared. too wide at first, it ran through the
woods,
the valley of murmur, as if someone recognized it. I yelled:
wait, I’ll hide you inside my word, and someone
willing and happy will handle it further. to which lake does God
travel to?
I don’t know, I said and turned away. everywhere the month of May
carried ripening. and dark dots that exited seeds closed
every night, decidedly, as this one” (“The Lake 15,” Dead Letter Office 61).

Ο συλλέκτης των Κυριακών

Marko Pogačar, Nikolas Koutsodontis (translator)

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Marko Pogačar

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