More than 20 years ago, I had the opportunity to live for several months in Sao Paulo, where my mathematician ex-husband was collaborating with a colleague. During the week, while our son was being looked after in daycare, I would wander down the street from our apartment in the city’s centre to an excellent English-language bookshop to browse the shelves. The shop had a good selection of poetry.
One day, I discovered a book by a poet of whom I hadn't heard. His name was Goran Simic. He had witnessed and escaped the war in Sarajevo, and had written a book of powerful war poems. (The book I’d serendipitously discovered on another continent was Sprinting from the Graveyard, published in 1997 in the Oxford Poet Series.) With the help of PEN, an NGO that aids writers in conflict zones, Simic went first to London (I believe), and then, in not too long a time, moved to Toronto, where I got to meet and become friends with him.
Simic was a "Poet" with a capital "P". A prolific, ambitious, larger-than-life, irresistibly silver-tongued romantic in every sense of that word, including the sense of his being an incorrigible, unrepentant wooer (and abandon-er) of many a woman (on one occasion, I sat at a table in a bar with several women, all of whom he had made some kind of play for, while they compared notes); a drinker of whiskey and wine and smoker of pipes; a husband and father. He was a man who inspired profound friendships with men and who perhaps on some levels sometimes also abandoned them. (I am expressing the sentiments of the poet, Fraser Sutherland, here. Fraser, also now sadly deceased, loved Goran in the way that D.H. Lawrence believed that straight men should love one another. And who felt abandoned when Goran didn’t keep in close touch.)
While I think, after five whiskies, we did share a French kiss once in the back of a car – that night is a bit hazy – I didn't really know him well enough to say much more, and friends reading this may wish to correct me. But what I must say unequivocally is that Goran Simic was a fine, an astonishingly fine, poet.
I heard the news of
his death about a week ago while travelling with my now-grown son in the north
of Wales. I was having breakfast in a
Victorian fortress of a hotel in Llandudno when I got a sudden
unexpected Messenger Call from Colin Carberry, an Irish/Canadian poet friend
who lives in Mexico. "Goran is dead," he pronounced. Unable to
believe his own words. I was shocked and struck down by grief. How could such a force of life have become extinguished? Without warning? I still don’t know what weapon the Grim Reaper wielded.
Even though it was still early morning, upon hearing the news, I went straight to my room to have a glass of whiskey.
Here I am with Goran, and another good poet from Toronto, Luciano Iacobelli, who tragically died of cancer in August of 2022. It is I believe in 2007, and we are in Luce's apartment after a reading that Luce had hosted somewhere on College Street. Wonderful memories... sigh…
Karen Shenfeld has written four collections of poetry. Her latest, To Measure the World, was published in 2020 by Ekstasis Editions.