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Lalic’s previous collection, as this one introduced and translated by Francis Jones, was titled A Rusty Needle; now we have Fading Contact. The titles reflect a path towards a diminishing sense of the world holding together, towards the increasing fragility of memory, towards emptiness.

One more hour in memory, one less mouthful
                                                       of water
In the glass on the table;
the paths in your garden, Mother,
Branch so strangely -
And at every turn
One less chance to solve this night:
How my future face frightens me
In the mirror, at dawn -

The magisterial transcendent quality marks this as it did the earlier volume, but I find Fading Contact the more difficult. In A Rusty Needle the imagery felt more vital and intense, there was more frequent address to an actual other, there was more context in which to place the subtleties and abstractions of his thought. Compare for example ‘Wind’ from the earlier volume:

Wind dressing and undressing the sea
In the torn lace of light, a salty web,
Coarse between two embraces,... ... .... ... .
Wind flicking through time tonight like a
                                                 dictionary,
burying me in nouns of love
Light and bitter, like leaves of gleaming
                                                         copper.

     With ‘Winter Sea’:

A winter sea white with fresh scars,
After-images of summer shivering in the pines,
Say something, if only to voice
The root of a rose - you know
The unfinished returns like justice
The imperfect must pass away -

Wind as the central image is preserved in the first and the senses of it carries the content. In the other, similar, poem the central image is lost in the dis-junctures of the middle two lines. The meaning has slipped between my fingers.

     As Francis Jones emphasises in the introduction, Lalic is a Mediterranean poet. The sea and its light, stony terrain, vines and olives are rarely far off. His sense of that landscape and the cultural history engraved on it creates the resonance of the poems. And there is too the sense of violence and dissolution about its eastern shores.

     As in the earlier volume the translator’s introduction, guide and insights into translation strategies as well as notes on individual poems are extensive and meticulous as such a classic of European poetry merits. This work belongs to the middle period of Lalic’s writing. I’d welcome a selection/collection to cover earlier and later periods.