Balkan Spaces

This volume of essays and prose-pieces by Richard Berengarten reflects his sustained involvement in the Balkans over a period of more than thirty-five years. By focusing on his experience of Yugoslavia before, during and after that country's dissolution, Balkan Spaces locates, tracks and celebrates aspects of history, folk tradition, literary culture, educational practice, politics and poetry, while also including affectionate memoirs of many friends, most of them writers. Through intimate explorations and careful research, Berengarten discovers some of the patternings, varieties and bounties of the Balkan and Yugoslav heritage. While his keen eye questions and explores what William Blake called the minute particulars, his overall vision is panoramic and multi-faceted. This book embodies a commitment to the values and varieties of Balkan civilization, to the poetic imagination, and to the poet's vocation and craft.This collection of essays and sketches offers a poet's vision of the spaces of former Yugoslavia and of their people, cultures and manners. Part scholarship, part political reflection, part poetry, part travel-writing, part memoir, Balkan Spaces constitutes a deeply human approach to reimagining the Balkan puzzle and its pieces. - PAUL SCOTT DERRICKA rich compendium of a poet's personal memories and spiritual migrations, Richard Berengarten's Balkan Spaces aren't just geographical. They're the spaces of psyche and spirit too. This blend, precisely, is what characterises the intimate signature of his oeuvre and transforms this collection into an act of profound homage. - KATICA KULAVKOVAWhile Berengarten's poetry and his prose can be read and enjoyed independently of each other, when we read both together we realise that they are intervolved. Intervolvement of poetry and prose is the hallmark of this distinguished and distinctive writer. And this is clear from the intricate mosaic of Balkan Spaces. -ANTHONY RUDOLF