When the Romanian literary journal Transylvania published a selection of Aleksandar Petrov's poems in 1988, the translator, Mircea Ivanescu, a distinguished Romanian poet and literary critic, gave a brief but comprehensive portrait of the Serbian writer:

A poet of intellectual lyricism, an authentic and vibrant sensibility, who knows how to combine data from a biography dedicated to creativity with data pertaining to the specific culture of his country as well as to universal culture, this is the poet and literary critic Aleksandar Petrov. The selection in this issue presents him in a contemporary and universal lyrical landscape, as a unique voice of extraordinary originality and strength, as a truly important modern poet (his poems have been rendered into English by the outstanding American poet Charles Simic) and representative of the best of Yugoslav poetry. The creative spirit of that country, the beauty of its landscape and its people, are...