The poems in [Vučja so, Živo meso, and Kuća nasred druma] were written during the last quarter-century, although most of them are of very recent vintage. As has been the case throughout his poetic career, Popa always writes with a well-conceived plan of cycles, so that new poems easily fit into the already existing entities or form a new cycle. At the same time, seldom is a new book of Popa's poems totally new, either thematically or formally. Some poems in these books are related, for example, to his earlier collection, Uspravna zemlja,… and the myth of a wolf runs through many of his books.

The first collection, Vučja so (Wolf's Salt), is the best of the three. It is centered around the myth of a wolf as an old Slavic symbol of vitality, not of evil and destruction…. The well-known terseness and directness of...