Don Quixote on Fifth Avenue offers a selection taken from Bilosnić’s previously published collections of poetry: Pred zavjesama (“Facing the Curtains”), I društvo koje ostaje (“The Remaining Company”), Približavanje ptica (“The Birds Approacheth”), and Znaci za uzbunu (“Warning Signs”). The latest collection is bilingual, in English and Romanian, translated by Roman Karlović and the collection’s editor Daniel Dragomirescu.
Writer Tomislav Marijan Bilosnić has published his latest collection Don Quixote on Fifth Avenue / Don Quijote pe Strada a Cincea as part of the Universalis series of the independent online journal Contemporary Literary Horizon based in the Romanian city of Iaşi. This is the twenty-fourth foreign language volume published by Bilosnić.
Don Quixote on Fifth Avenue offers a selection taken from Bilosnić’s previously published collections of poetry: Pred zavjesama (“Facing the Curtains”), I društvo koje ostaje (“The Remaining Company”), Približavanje ptica (“The Birds Approacheth”), and Znaci za uzbunu (“Warning Signs”). The latest collection is bilingual, in English and Romanian, translated by Roman Karlović and the collection’s editor Daniel Dragomirescu.
The collection was reviewed by a pair of established American poets and literary critics, John Tischer, now resident in the Mexican town of Tepoztlán, and Michael White in the United States of America.
In his reviewer Tischer notes that “Tomislav Marijan Bilosnić is an urban poet, a companion of beatniks, with a taste of the despair of a Sylvie Plath, immersed in human diversity like Jacques Prevert, a poet of the quotidian grey interspersed with flashes of red, giving the impression of music not yet attained; music painting a still life of the modern city. His language is pure and simple; like the language of the ordinary worker, the language of everyday life. It may hold both your truth and mine; everyman’s truth. A plastic language with a surrealistic accent… This is the kind of poetry I wish I had written! What more could I ask!”
“What a brilliant title,” Michael White exclaims in opening his review, imagining a “Tall, slender, Quixote, obscure and unattainable, walking the street alone, attracting trouble at every step.” In Bilosnić’s poetry Michael White finds the voice of a modern Quixote “unable to avoid debt and fearing every shadow” on a pavement lit by the cold moon, “waiting for the amorous wisdom that always arrives with an ironic twist of fate.” White concludes that the poet in solitude, always his faithful companion “bends in the winds of the modern age, trying to smile as the world devours itself.”
Don Quixote on Fifth Avenue is Tomislav Marijan Bilosnić’s fifth volume published in Romania, preceded by the collections Tigar (“Tiger”), Afrika (“Africa”), and Odisej (“Odyssey”), which saw two editions. Bilosnić’s collection is accompanied by a special edition lexicon of the authors whose works have been published in the Universalis series and that affords Bilosnić’s particular attention. The lexicon is the work of the editor of the Universalis series and of the Contemporary Literary Horizon journal, prominent Romanian poet, editor and publisher Daniel Dragomirescu. (DHK)
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