In recent years Ivan V. Lalic has gained an international reputation as one of the major poets of the former Yugoslavia. His poetic quest into the nature of time, culture, and human perception combines a startling clarity of images and a thoughtful, highly crafted, lucid diction that places him firmly in the tradition of European and American modernism, in which he is acknowledged to be one of Europe's masters.

Lalic was born into a cultured family in Belgrade on 8 June 1931; his father, Vlajko, was a journalist, and his grandfather Isidor Bajic had been a celebrated composer. Half a century later, in 1983, a BBC interviewer asked Lalic how he had found his poetic voice. "My childhood and boyhood in the war marked everything I ever wrote as a poem or poetry," Lalic replied, leaning forward to pick up Izabrane i nove pesme, the definitive selection of his early verse...