Written out of the siege of Sarajevo, Sprinting from the Graveyard records civilian life under bombardment.

Simić writes about hunger, shelling, damaged streets, vanished neighbours, family life and the almost comic, ordinary behaviour undergone whilst a city is being destroyed. The poems are brief, lucid and often almost reportorial; their force comes from what they refuse to inflate. Horror arrives through the detail left standing after rhetoric has been stripped away. 

There is irony here, sometimes savage, but little of the moral grandstanding that can make war poetry feel pre-decided. Simić is interested in the collapse of distinctions: between civilian and target, survival and humiliation, patriotism and death, the domestic and the historical. In “Victory,” public celebration is placed beside theft, starvation and the memory of a father entering town armed and skeletal, until the word itself becomes almost unusable. The graveyard is not merely a symbol in these poems. It is part of the city’s practical geography.

The collection was rendered into English by poet and playwright David Harsent from Simić’s original Bosnian poems. These versions gave Simić a major English-language readership, though later retranslations restored material he felt had been altered or softened here—a complicated history worth knowing rather than disguising. This remains a stark and significant document of Sarajevo: poetry as witness, but also as resistance to the simplifications imposed by nationalism and war.

Oxford University Press, Oxford Poets, 1997 first edition paperback. Moderate rubbing and scratching to covers, edge wear and lightly bumped corners; internally clean and sound.