Publisher's Synopsis
James Sutherland-Smith has lived and worked in Serbia and Montenegro through the difficult transitions. Old states fragmented and a new Balkan political landscape emerged. He writes, not as an observer, but from within cultures rebuilding after political and social upheaval. Popeye in Belgrade records the aftershocks of those moral and spiritual earthquakes in the Balkans, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The movements of history play out in private, intimate contexts whose subtleties the poet catches with an ear and eye alert to the nuances of personal and public feeling. Political and social concerns form part of each poem's texture, as they form part of the invisible fabric of individual lives. Music and the natural world are presences throughout the collection, not as sources of consolation but as expressions of elusive otherness. They persist outside the unstable complexities of human society.
