I had not known Milorad as long as most, having first met him five years ago when working for the Coventry-based Heaventree Press. His fifth collection, The Yasen Tree, had just been published and I was working to promote it around the region. Though softly spoken, he was always very happy to read for an audience and I have fond memories of him readily taking to the window of a Waterstone's branch in Coventry on a busy Saturday afternoon to read some of his poems as shoppers stopped, wondering what was going on - the photograph above was taken that day.
And what poems they are... there is a mellifluous quality to his work, which is sometimes dreamlike, occasionally haunting. Things are observed just as they take flight, unnamed characters are drifting apart and finding something in the nature of rain falling in a garden or the quality of the evening light that makes perfect and resounding sense of life. All of this without pretension or unnecessary adornment and clearly a great appreciation of nature, whether in urban or rural environments.
Milorad also loved photography and reflected this in how he captured images with clarity and detail, but also a keen economy. In a short author's note Milorad wrote about his most recent collection, Improvising Memory, he mentions how "...instead of developing films in a dark-room, I used my notebook and pen and exposed my hands to the lamplight". His poems and collections also spoke of other, darker and more troubling themes too: the deep sadness of leaving behind his homeland and family in Dalmatia in Croatia in 1992, and hints of the unimaginable suffering that war had inflicted upon the people of the region.
There was as well the concern and love of language ever-present in his work - especially the tension of two languages co-operating, never in conflict yet always in a process of refraction: of one language moving meaning through the lens of another. All good poets know the difficulty at times of getting what makes sense in our mind's eye to make sense in words - an everyday act of translation at the heart of making poetry. For Milorad, his ideas and images also had to traverse the terrain of two languages, side-by-side in an instant, before settling upon the page. His earliest collections were poems published in both Croatian and English translation, but later these collections were English alone. Milorad had told me that he drafted the poems in English but still thought the ideas in his first language, translating to the page as he composed. David Hart sums up this rare and instinctive quality of Milorad's poetic language perfectly in his foreword to Improvising Memory:
"I have found myself thinking these poems are in a condition of unstable translation, but not with any notion of their inadequacy or secondariness, on the contrary, only that they are finely balanced in Milorad’s catching of them, in their fragile and surprising making."
I have mentioned that Milorad had many good friends. A little while after his arrival in Birmingham in the nineties, he joined the Cannon Poets group who meet regularly at the MAC and have done so for many years (being one of Britain's longest running poetry groups, surely?). Here he found a warm welcome and much long-lasting friendship and support in fellow writers, particularly in Cathy Perry and Martin Underwood who have constantly encouraged and supported his writing over many years (as well as publishing his earlier collections as part of Writers Without Borders). Above and beyond this, they have tirelessly cared for and supported Milorad throughout his illness. He also made many good friends through his work at the Brasshouse language college in Birmingham and thrived in the company of writers and readers and those who loved and prized language as he did.
Quite aside from poetry, Milorad was a very prolific writer in general and had written countless manuscripts - children's fiction, young adult fiction, six short novel manuscripts, and theatre manuscripts. He'd also published a Croatian phrasebook for Collins. Even during his illness he was keen to write as much as he could, and when no longer able to do that, he was still redrafting his work (we had been working with him on a new Nine Arches collection, Moses' Footprints) up until around seven weeks ago.
We had the pleasure of working with Milorad in 2010 on his sixth collection Improvising Memory and had many good talks over tea about the manuscript - he was excellent company during these good-humoured sessions. The launch night (last May in Birmingham) came after almost a year of treatment for his brain tumour, and despite his health problems he was determined to be there and to read. It was a wonderful launch event I'll never forget. Many friends came to support by reading from the book or performing music, some of which had been inspired by his poems. Milorad arrived with literally arms full of roses (he'd told me he was bringing some flowers as gifts to say thank-you to people, but he arrived with two of the biggest bags I've ever seen, full of red and yellow roses for people, plus bouquets of roses and little pots of roses... ). He really was generosity embodied, a very kind and thoughtful man.
I'm so glad he made these memories, I'm glad he wrote so many exceptional poems and left them for us to continue enjoying. I am also glad he was able to return to Croatia last Autumn and see his homeland one last time.
Our deepest sympathy to his many friends and colleagues. He made the Birmingham poetry scene so much richer for his being a part of it, and we're all made poorer at this moment by his loss.
Here's one of Milorad's poems, which we printed, as below, with the last verse in English and Croatian on the event programme at the launch last year. This poem was sung and set to music during the launch.
Jane
Dream Gap - Milorad Krystanovich
Night streams through the midsummer
and darkens the fenced enclosure.
Not irritated by the lime tree blossom,
they sleep near the pine tree.
Coloured like the skin of the moon,
the garden is no longer their property,
not even they can tame the sky to enter
and mend their entwined dream.
Clothed only in tree flowers,
passers-by sing and dance in their clogs,
none of them halt to wake the sleepers
to listen to their steps and their song:
we cannot fall asleep and join you
in the base of dying moonlight,
not even our shadows leave
our outstretched arms,
nor can we change
this serenade into
an empty silence.
Mi ne možemo zaspati zajedno s tobom
Na kriški tla sve bljeđe mjesečine,
Čak ni naše sjenke ne odlaze
S naših raširenih ruku
Niti smo moćni zamijeniti
Ovu tužnu ljubavnu pjesmu
Za praznu tišinu.
Further poems from Improvising Memory were featured on Michelle McGrane's blog, Peony Moon.
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