Immigrant Blues

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

Already known as a writer in his native Yugoslavia, Goran Simic has been
living in Toronto since 1996. Immigrant Blues is his first Canadian
book, and it is a powerful expression of the exile’s loss and
memories. Seven of the poems were written in English; the rest have been
translated by Amela Simic.

Whether written in English or translated, Simic’s poems are
essentially narrative, understated, sardonic, and full of a sort of
surrealism that may in fact be all too real, given that they are based
on memories and dreams of a country torn apart by sectarian violence. In
the long first section, the speaker seems to shift from poem to poem,
while in the later sections he seems to be a more autobiographical
figure; but whoever he is supposed to be, he is essentially the person
who tells us, “I am an ordinary man and it’s clear to me: / whenever
I was born I’ll die young.” That knowledge underlies everything the
poems say.

The first part of the collection provides a view of Canada both
wide-eyed and hard-nosed: gentle satire of the present exile’s
position mixes with savagely remembered horror. The later poems, about
the concept of Borges in Sarajevo and encounters with the dead
(especially the speaker’s parents), are sadder: they look backward
without hope. Thinking of the beauty of Borges’s poems, the speaker
realizes that “it was too late when I noticed that my town / resembled
an ashtray.” Simic’s ability to represent violence and loss through
the most ordinary images gives these poems a sense of habitation that
the often-surreal references only reinforce.

Immigrant Blues is a powerful testament to the loss of a homeland.