SOURCE: Elsie, Robert. Review of Poémes, 1957-1997, by Ismail Kadare. World Literature Today 72, no. 2 (spring 1998): 428.

In the following review, Elsie evaluates both the poems collected in Poémes, 1957-1997 and Kadare's impact on the whole of Albanian poetry.

The international reception of Ismail Kadare's works over the last thirty years has been mixed. In the Albanian and French-speaking worlds, he is and remains the Albanian prose writer par excellence and has enjoyed wide acclaim. The English, German, Italian, and Spanish-speaking publics have been more reserved, though this is understandable because of the paucity of readable translations until recently (literary translators from the Albanian are a rare breed indeed). But with a wide variety of works, such as Chronicle in Stone (1987), Broken April (1990), The Concert (1994), Albanian Spring (1994), The Palace of Dreams (1996), The File on H. (1997; see the Noted subsection below), and The Three-Arched Bridge (1997), having been published in...