Reviewed by Steven Sher

Following the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the continuing "war on terror," readers might blanch at the title of Nina Zivancevc's selected poems, Death of New York City. What a relief to learn that there is no new threat impending. Yet Belgrade-born Zivancevic, an exile living in New York, is an unsettling, world-tested conscience that reminds us (in almost 80 highly idiomatic and inventive English poems covering a twenty-year period) of what we stand to lose. We would do well to listen–if only to experience the range of cultures and poetic movements she embraces (from Byzantine to Renaissance art, from the French symbolists and surrealists to the New York School, from Black Mountain to the Beats, from performance poetry to popular music). Even when she lectures us–an occasional line of rhetoric or flat self-consciousness–e can't dismiss her intellect or energy.

New York, take care. The storied legacy of a great city (any culture) may not be enough to fend off the forces that would destroy it. In "Royal Chase," set amid the battle of Kosovo, a world of mutilated soldiers and rigid, senseless rule, Zivancevic decries the fate of a culture, hence a people, destroyed:

Caught in this genocide, all survivors have are:

So Zivancevic sings (though not in her native Serbian now) for those who can no longer sing, and for those who censor themselves ("There are People Who Can Never Talk"), inhibited or afraid–so closed "they can never become poets"–and for those who speak too much and therefore aren't taken seriously.

Some European cities have fared better, their rich heritage preserved, if no longer honored: in Florence, "where Giotto who merciful/to leave his frescoes behind"; in Rome with its "petrified creatures," fountains, and churches, Caravaggio's St. Peter "like/an old man/evicted from his low income housing project," where the music is "even more innocent than those angels above"; in Paris, where the "lights dwelled in my heart" and the poet breathed the same air as Apollinaire.

Wherever man tries to create something noble and immortal, there are consequences, Zivancevic knows. For one, the women in her striking portraits suffer under male-dominated cultures. In "Poem with a Tilde," princess Doña Infanta is "entrapped/in a Velasquez painting." In "Sketches from Byzantium," Ottoman concubines are living claustrophobic and "ghostly/desperate" lives:

Unafraid of the truth (she holds up "stained and broken mirrors" that leave her trembling "before something hollow"), Zivancevic is driven by a pure aesthetic vision. If only she were"allowed one moment/Of silence once a day"; if only she could wake up smiling; if only a "divine" moment, smelling oranges and incense while hearing music in the 42nd Street subway station, could last–then she would be truly free. But she can't, and her revelations–because she's lived under a communist regime (Yugoslavia), because she's seen Belgrade in ruins–are not surprising:"…the Almighty/ Segneur of Oblivion covers with thick dust/us all, and especially us who believed…" In "Gilles Dies, So What," she descries the fact that three million people are

While she is nostalgic for places and people she cared for, she wants no part of that Europe "ridden by plagues and wars," wants to be taken away from "[n]eo-classical order and dumbness,/away from the North Station where they/took 2,000,000 Jews away to the camps…

In "Spirit of Renaissance," which recalls how European explorers seduced the New World natives ("superior gondoliers slide past uncivilized shores"), Zivancevic demands atonement for past pomposity and foolishness: "and in everyone's eyes, oh, if we dared/to look into each other's eyes–/the spirit of the Renaissance." Nor is America, which has inherited this same sense of superiority, spared a foreigner's English accent judged in "Don't They…"; a lover compared to a lineup of pigeons staring into New York harbor in "Lined Up"; the divide drawn wide in "East Side Blues Again" between those who have no food and money and those of privilege: "From the top of the World Trade Center–/now you want art?"

Zivancevic's longest piece, "Death of New York City," is a both symbolistic bashing of old male masters as well as a call for us to live by our emotions, framed as a failed-love poem:

With a nod to the surrealists (Zivancevic recalls how Gala left her husband, the poet Paul Eluard, for Salvador Dalí because she "observed poetry in Dalí's eyes") and a wink to Wallace Stevens (the young poet in one section "cuddling his blue guitar" while promising never to get involved again, having had enough of elders' "immortal advice/and cute comforts to compliment their misogyny"), Zivancevic admits the hold that the revered poet of her poem has over her as he "descends alone,/from his outer sanctum and his resplendent, distant sky." Yet giving him up is not easy:

The real enemy is loneliness, and Zivancevic's poems wage war with it, a war that transcends time and borders, that is being fought in every major western city and in every soul, and that started long before September 11th, Only the creative impulse offers the possibility of something better, albeit briefly, some clarity and hope for those "with crushed stars instead of eyes" and "the solitary posture/ of a warrior." Seeing someone close to her sinking in such sadness and pain, she says, "sometimes I become quiet/ like a mute lizard resting beneath/the horrid beauty of your rising sun."

Zivancevic knows that before we attend to the problems of the larger world and decide which justice applies to us all, we have to attend to our own less complex worlds first. To start, we might accept that we get angry, hurt, or blinded because some think in "spirals," others in "squares." This is much needed wisdom for our terror-troubled age, or any other.

A Brooklyn native living in Oregon, Steven Sher is the author of two new poetry books, Thirty-Sex (Creative Arts Books 2002) and Flying through Glass (Outloudbooks, 2001), which was reviewed in ABR 23.2/.