The Killed

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

The first two-thirds of Douglas Smith’s book is powerful, the title
sequence in which a woman translator recalls the siege of Sarajevo. She
suffers from devastating memories of the dead, who seem to rise up
before her. This is poetry relying on strong details more than on
figures of speech—figures might dishonor the dead by making their
fates decorative. The reader will come away remembering dead bodies with
ice in their ears and the corpse of a boy whose back is soldered to the
side of the truck in which he was riding. It is daring to appropriate
the point of view of a war victim, but Smith handles his subject with
compassion and tact.

The remainder of the book, a sequence called “Milosevic in Paris,”
suffers from a lack of restraint. Smith writes a fantasy about Milosevic
and a bodyguard who wants to kill him. Much of the sequence is devoted
to ridiculing the dictator’s Eastern European haircut. The World War I
poet Wilfred Owen said, “the poetry is in the pity.”

It is not in ridicule. Charlie Chaplin found that it was impossible to
ridicule Hitler in The Great Dictator. Smith has a similar problem, but
the opening sequence makes the book worth reading.