Fading Contact

Fading Contact' is a middle-period masterwork by the great Serbo-Croat poet who died suddenly at the height of his powers in July 1996. It marks the watershed between the blazing, vivid imagery of his youthful poetry and the measured, complex verse of his later work. A Mediterranean warmth and light suffuses these poems in which he explores in direct language and with scalpel-sharp aptness of image the nature of memory, culture - its fragile continuity - and of existence itself.

Ivan V Lalic (1931-96) studied law in Zagreb, where he first began to publish poetry, and worked for the publishers Nolit in Belgrade. He was also a distinguished critic and translator, especially of English poetry.

His other books in English with Anvil and Francis R Jones are Last Quarter' (1987), The Passionate Measure' (European Poetry Translation Prize, 1989) and A Rusty Needle' (Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation, 1996).

Francis R Jones (b. 1955) lectures in English as a foreign language at the University of Newcastle. His other translations include Hans Faverey's Against the Forgetting' (Anvil, 1995) and Vasko Popa's Collected Poems' (with the late Anne Pennington, Anvil, 1997).