Review by Mira Mataric
DEATH’S HOMELAND
by Dragan Dragojlovi
translated by Stanislava Lazarevic
Curbstone Press
321 Jackson Street
Willimantic, CT 06226-1738
ISBN 978-1931896-45-0
2008, 71 pp., $13.95
www.curbstone.org
D. Dragojlovic, as an author of 18 books, has been uniquely popular–read, sold, and reprinted multiple times. Among his many works, poems selected into Death’s Homeland have been acclaimed as the most poignant and moving collection of anti-war poems ever read. In an interview with Jennifer Kanyock and Bonnie Weikel, the author simply states: “Every war, civil wars in particular, mean defeat of all the participants.” He sees the religious motivations behind war as the most brutal and inhumanly appalling of all man’s actions, emphasizing the tragic enigma of how people who believe in a loving God can murder each other, all while claiming their belief in the deity of pure love, peaceful brotherhood and tolerance.
The first poem, “Stone of Woe,” sets the scene by painting a mental landscape of the locale denoted in the title of the book:
