Mothers, Shoes, and Other Mortal Songs.

Fruchter, Barry

The British military philosopher John Keegan has popularized the concept of "the fog of war," a nebulous aura of chaos that accounts for, essentially justifies, the most egregious barbarisms under cover of the stress that breaks down strategy, tactics, and logic. In this, the latest of his many collections of verse, the distinguished Bosnian poet Mario Susko goes far toward dissipating that "fog" with the searchlight of truth, albeit a homely, quotidian truth all the more stunning for that quality.

The Bosnian War has already been reconstructed, even extended, through print, from "eyewitness accounts" by journalists to slickly packaged children's diaries to political tracts by the leaders of the warring parties. Susko's book is none of these. Instead, it registers the stations of a poet's journey through a landscape rendered small by siege, large by international implication, and deep by the enforcing of memory. The musings of the poetic persona, presented in the editorial "frame" as having been posthumously published/translated in the mid-twenty-first century, take on not so much the expansive dimensions of Hamlet's "I could be bounded in a nutshell" speech as they do the familiarly sinister ring of twentieth-century narratives of siege, imprisonment, and captivity; we hear Meursault's decision to feed upon a past in the absence of a future.

As the broadly satiric introduction by Joszef Klem makes clear, the poems are numbered as if following the seconds of a pulse or the scholarly traditions of an Emily Dickinson edition. There is in fact abundant and (dare one say it) hilarious cross-referencing of a number of recognizable poets American, English, French, Spanish, German, and, undoubtedly, for those proficient in the language, Croatian and Serbian. The truly delightful aspect of this "game" is, of course, that it feeds into our learned response of willy-nilly seeing such references everywhere. For example, if I wish to see poem 0:16, which mentions an encounter with a puddle (of blood?) in a sniper-alley, as referencing both Jacques Prevert and Pablo Neruda, I may do so, and thereby be caught in the poet's web of ridicule and pity. For it is precisely such games, the text seems to say, that not only fail us but precipitate the megalomaniacs who lead us - even poets like "R.K.," the "rebel leader" who shared a double-bill reading with our poet-persona before the war - to believe in their own bloody delusions.

The visible landscape in which most of the poems are grounded is an apartment house near Sarajevo's airport front line at the height of the war. One of the starkest poems, 0:06, still reflects the constant interleaving of the poet's childhood (hence Mothers in the title), which makes his story of terrifying stasis also a story of history and, by implication, of prophecy. In it the poet finds himself staring at a mouse across the room and thinking of three mice of his childhood, interleaving the "real" and the "artificial": "One day my mother placed / a rubber mouse in front of our cat. / I at that time had a tin mouse / a shiny little key sticking out of its belly. / But obviously we had a real one in the house." The cat may or may not have realized the life-or-death outcome of its "test killing," but the family certainly realized the equivalence, for them, of the Marshall Plan-distributed "Truman eggs . . . and / cheese smelling of my father's feet." In an economical image, one of Susko's best, there follows a classic aporia or gap in which the adult poet suddenly recalls that the child could not connect the cat's testing "to mother's words / about my father, 'If he keeps on like that, / white mice will one day dance before him.'"

Thus the circle of mice ("too many of these around") is unbroken and extended from the realm of daily survival - the economic "motor of history" that made possible the socialist world of which the late Yugoslavia was a part - into the "realm of ideas," a nightmare post-Hegelia in which white mice multiply in response to our romantic, chemically aided desires for the "Anywhere Out of This World." The perhaps widest stretching of the circle comes with the realization, cumulative to readers of this volume, that the "white mice" came to suggest the foreign forces which contributed to Sarajevo's nightmare landscape and made scenes like the opening one in this poem inevitable. These realms of economics, aberrant vision, and verminous attack merge in the Sarajevo cellar of the 1990s: "Half a century later while the building shakes / from squeaking shells a mouse and I / are in the cellar staring diagonally at each other. / Maybe to him I'm nothing but a rubber cat / for he knows we can't chase one another away."

As for the remainder of the volume, most worthy of note are the several "visual" poems, such as 0:16, which leap over the concrete poetry of Maclow and Enzensberger to dance in the older light of Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw, and such as 0:33, with its inheritance of Cummings, Duncan, and the poetics of space. Finally, acting as both anchor and planting, marker and sustenance, is the series of prose poems, numbered 1 through 9 with decimal additions, interwoven with the 41 "0" poems. Without at all compromising the poet's vigilant sense of narrative economy, these pieces remind us of the "real"/"artificial" objective correlative: the (mediated) war in Sarajevo, its would-be heroes and (perhaps) villains, from 2:10, which exposes the folly of trusting the UN "General MacK." and his "white mice" and thereby exposing oneself to danger, to 3:16, on the horrendous follies of informal seminars on comparative suffering, to 6:22, on the obsessive phrase-mongering of those under siege and the equal follies of those besieging them. Poem 8:29 is especially fascinating in its use of what the poet calls "the end of the novel about my grandmother's brother, a volunteer called Annibale Noferi," in fact an actually existing novel called Vent'-Anni, by Corrado Alvaro. The quoted passage speculates on the requirements imposed on the postwar world by those returned from the front: "We will imagine the world bigger, more beautiful, more noble, more adventurous [than it is], and we'll seek it in all the most desperate enterprises and raging causes." The character's vision becomes a benchmark for those, journalists and poets alike, who seek to report Sarajevo "as it is" and to avoid the histrionics, "cheap shots" (pun intended), and delusions that come with the territory. This goal Susko, in employing the layering techniques of verse, prose poetry, memory and history, cross-referencing, and even the fictional frame under the tutelage of a new, twenty-first-century "Josef Ka," this one not yet come to trial, succeeds admirably in revealing.

In the words of Slavoj Zizek, another wry Balkan commentator, "Every historical rupture, every / advent of a new master-signifier, changes / retroactively the meaning of all tradition, / restructures the narrative of the past, makes it / readable in another, new way." Mario Susko has dwelt within such a "historical rupture" and invites us to use it carefully and tentatively to read our/the past(s) in "another, new way." We should accept the invitation.

Barry Fruchter Nassau Community College (N.Y.)