Lidija Cvetkovic's War is not the Season for Figs is an arresting collection of poems, deeply informed by personal experience of recent Balkan conflicts and a sensitivity to place, the nailprints of history, and a personal commitment to the value of testimony. Cvetkovic's poetry has the tautness of focus and the concentration of lyricism at its most pellucid."Strong, resonant, purposeful: these poems don't cajole the reader, they guide and direct the reader with the passion of deep-felt urgency to that place where the present and the past generate sparks off each other. This is where the lyric is reaching us in the twenty-first century."Thomas Shapcott
Lidija Cvetkovic was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1967 and came to Australia in 1980. With a close and recurring regard to twentieth century conflicts in the Balkans and the internalisation of such violence and disintegration within family history, Cvetkovic’s poetry is written from the perspective of the émigré. This distance allows her to bear witness to her history from a perspective doubled between the life before and the life after emigration, often by bearing witness to her family’s experience of dispossession and exile:
