Ivana Milankov is one of Serbia's best-known poets whose poems question themselves as much as they question the world around them. Distances in space and time are reduced to the size of a line break as the poet searches for meaning in experience; despite this, however, it is a surprisingly transparent poetry, where a world is created in each poem, holding our attention through an underlying drama of reason and feeling. Milankov's poetry allows us to glimpse a modernism that draws part of its reference from the presence of the Roman Empire and surrounding ancient civilisations of the Middle...

Mila Haugova has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one's own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother's childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with ever present memories. Haugova overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world? Re-encounter and farewells are one in...