Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...title sequence of the book takes the reader through a tour of Dante's tomb. Schnackenberg's meditation on the poet becomes a lament for the loss of a great poetic tradition. The speaker grieves that "no one will ever bother to cast again" the stunning images he created. The tone becomes less pessimistic as Schnackenberg begins to blur the lines between past and present: "There is a flood remnant...As if the Samaritan woman's water jar/Had been hurled against the wall, and was still dripping...Or it may be only a freshly washed floor/ Whose little lakes...
...third sequence, "A monument in Utopia," draws a parallel between the death of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam at the hands of Stalin and the death of poetry itself in a cynical society. Primarily concerned with images of death and destruction, the third sequence also holds out a ray of hope for resurrection, a rebirth of faith and idealism. By the end of the third sequence, Schnackenberg encapsulates the whole pageant of human history in a few line...
...elegant, doleful man named Miroslav Jancic, poet and former diplomat, introduces himself. Sarajevo is a concentration camp, he says in quiet anguish. "How do you eat?" I ask. "Not well," he says. "This shirt used to fit perfectly." He inserts two fingers between his neck and the buttoned white shirt collar. Possibly the worst crime of the war -- worse even than the ingenious atrocities that are the specialite de la maison of the Balkans -- is the systematic starvation of entire populations by the Serb fighters surrounding cities like Tuzla and Srebrenica and Sarajevo...
...surreal transition: in armored personnel carriers supplied by the United Nations Protection Force, we make our way from the besieged to the besiegers. We pass through the lines, through checkpoints and no-man's-lands, to the headquarters of Radovan Karadzic, the Serb nationalist chieftain. Karadzic is a poet and, in civilian life, bizarrely enough, a psychiatrist. A sleek, fattish man with an expensive double-breasted suit, bushy eyebrows and flamboyantly styled long hair. I try to conjure up a psychiatric session with this healer. I see certain Hippocratic problems with a head doctor who would lead his patients...
Shanmugam, editor-in-chief of the Independent, said that the inter-viewers asked specific academic questions, like "Why was the poet Ovid exiled...