Charles Simic co-edited with Mark Strand the excellent anthology, Another Republic (1976). He shares with Strand an unmitigated conviction that Armageddon is not far off. But whereas the American is seemingly prompted by future fears alone, Simic, a Yugoslav, born to gallows humour as the sparks fly upward, is hounded by the past—the past, one presumes, not simply of his Serbian childhood: the past of Europe, which he retells as a succession of mini-Grimm fairy tales at their most monstrous, peopled by goblins, witches, men marching, blood and bones, phantom horses in the snow, Mongols and foxes: in short, all the paraphernalia of what he himself calls here The Great Dark Night of History. His Yugoslavia is a peninsula of the mind, unrecognizable as the same landscape which, under the aspect of Classical and Byzantine myth [Lawrence] Durrell, with whatever reservations, has glorified. Simic would never describe Sarajevo...