Writers after World War II were faced with a question: How should they write after the horrors of Hiroshima and the holocaust in Europe? There was no universal answer, and there could be none. The question contained another question just as essential: How should writers live after all that had happened? The poetics of the second half of the twentieth century were based by and large on the poets' answers to these questions. Matija Beckovic, who experienced the war catastrophe as a child, asked himself, especially as a mature poet, a basically similar though not identical question: How should he live and write not only after the horrible war crimes (perpetrated on his people as well) but also after the triumph of communist dictatorships at the end of the war, even in his own country, and on at least one half of the globe? The question was that...