Šime Knežević: In Your Dreams

Artarmon: Giramondo, 2025, 68pp.

This is a book that tempts you to use words like sophisticated, adventurous, accomplished and so on. And you could add a whole lot of others: confident, appealing, challenging, etc. But of course, adjectives like that don’t really do much more than describe vague initial impressions: they don’t tell us much about what’s going on under the skin. It’s taken me quite a while to feel even vaguely confident about what’s going on under the skin (or bonnet) of both In Your Dreams and Šime Knežević’s earlier chapbook, The Hostage.

One of the things that throws a reader initially – as it always does – is the variety of modes. An ordinary book which has forty or fifty difficult poems, but which all work away at a single group of themes or work in a similar way, sets a reader on the path of beginning to make generalisations. One may not know what the answer is but one knows how to go about looking. But In Your Dreams has poems that range from apparent memories of a Croatian childhood, written in luminously simple style, to pieces like the second of the “Itinerant” poems:

Game of acquisition, two players.
Baroque endings rarely play out.
Locate the word and file it – “the story”
 - there. Quotation marks,
delimit, a temporary referent.
What appears warm is unexpected.
A paraphrase. Of unknown
origin. In a doorway, the unseen
commands a “checkmate”
and for tomorrow they say rain.

Or “Things” – admittedly described in a note as a set of lines written for a collaborative project – which finishes,

. . . . . 
I saw the end like a flame that licks the foot of the candlestick.

For the love of god, the world ends with you, doesn’t it?

I hate you this is death it’s confusing I’m hungry.

If I had to venture an overall description of In Your Dreams, I’d very tentatively say that it is a set of different kinds of poems focussed on defining and exploring the self. (I know that this is dangerously close to being applicable to almost all books of poetry, but it has its value here: this is not a poetry of issues and opinions, let alone a poetry of contemporary pieties.) The result is a kind of kaleidoscope of perspectives drawing on actual experience, imagined experiences of others conceived novelistically (it’s always difficult to separate these two when one knows almost nothing of the poet’s biography), theatre and its shadowy companion, dream. There are quite a few poems in the two collections which support this approach: “Audit”, “Autofiction” and “Aubade” all have a sense of evaluating the self from the individual’s own perspective. They also all begin the first letter of the alphabet and it’s probably no accident that the poem which follows “Aubade”, “Brand”, begins with the second letter and is about the self, seen not from inside but from the perspective of outsiders:

I am being described by somebody else.
Who what how and when: I appear
hypothetically, high-fiving
my imaginary friends. A people pleaser.
Not all there. A mirage with croissant
in hand, taken now as the real thing.

The three “A-“ poems are, themselves, worth a close look. “Audit” is what its title says, a survey of self, though apart from the eye-catching proposition, “The lyric can be an elusive form / of self-reflection”, it’s not entirely straightforward, beginning

I accepted my lot to feed self
          -surveillance,
a matter of personal record
though freely available 
          to download
and absolutely not malware.
Like despair. Like shame.
I remain in prayer, divided.

The second stanza lists the characters who are actors in a kind of theatre of the self before going on the concern itself with the reader and the writer/reader relationship: “If you read yourself too / much into this, look for me / there”.

I read “Autofiction” – “The author composes an homage / to a self who sings and sails / on the great game of once upon a time” – as a description of what happens when the self expands either in creating or in reading so that it extends in time – “back to the Ancients” – and in social possibilities – “I am aging with the super-rich”. The experience isn’t always ecstatic though and although “I am as calm and confused as the sea”

. . . . . 
The feel of a daydream is like

the feel of a ripple in the ocean.
I am a ship in distress at sea.
I cry for mankind.wmv

“Aubade”, on the other hand, is a rapturous celebration of morning seen in the light of a change in attitude to life:

. . . . . 
For years I left my body on default, operatively
a post-migrant summary; my life followed the path
of a Nokia 3310 snake, or if I preferred the world

as memorable and perfunctory as a hotel room.
And now I slip out from hiding in all my yesterdays
somnambulant from room to nameless room.

For years I hated mornings but now I love you,
your air crisp, your whipped oats with honey,
cinnamon, your soft light, what it does to me.

I’ll keep my shoulders open, open to bits and pieces
in my chest, give bear hugs to my loved ones.
I pinch myself lucky: the feet in my socks sparkle.

That second stanza of “Audit” with its “imported actors / sailed in from somewhere” introduces theatre which is able to give a different – and perhaps rare for lyric poets – perspective on the self, especially in the way the self might adapt to the characters and, correspondingly, the way the characters relate to the authorial self. A lot of this turns up in the book’s second poem (the first, which I’ll try to say something about later, is a kind of cryptic introduction). In “Cast”, a child is imagined (we have no idea how autobiographically accurate this is) to leave parents behind and enter a theatre in the middle of a play in which adults are arguing. It’s a first sight of a wider, more adult self – “there’s much at stake / beyond the ambit of self” – but it is also a self created by what is happening on stage:

. . . . .
            I compose myself

in their costume, character,
language and dilemma – in this scene

I assemble my prototype:
agitated, intangible, wronged, uneasy,

ideas balkanised. Us
who look on are taken and altered.

“My Role” also inhabits the theatrical world and seems, on the surface, like an actual member of a rather over-organised theatrical company acknowledging his role in structural terms:

Like how a pie in the face is funny, except
it’s your face. My role in the corporate plan
is experimental performance. I account
for the efficacy of wellness ferns. Volunteer
as fire warden. Silently nod yes a great deal.
Walled in glass – I am Marcel Marceau.

Now I am waiting for the ceiling to collapse,
for the mind of this body to flee the scene.

It’s possible, of course, that this is not about a theatrical company at all, but that theatre is simply used as a metaphor for the way we all have to play a role when entering a corporate structure, but either way it’s a poem about role-playing and extends the idea of this being something that perhaps we aren’t in control of.

Another component of the self in In Your Dreams is the idea of itinerancy. There are quite a few settings which are drab and anonymous, made up of “nameless rooms”. The first of the two poems which are actually titled “Itinerant” describes what seems like a conference setting at the edge of a city:

World of furnished guest rooms,
cluttered, full of familiar, and rhetorical
fantasy. Small talk. Landmark of stillness
and its impossibility. Gentle as,
or by, example. Mostly not-knowing
the commerce at the edge
of the city. The unseen takes, and eats.
Over shoulder glances. At the margin
one body is prone to push another.
A voice expands uninterrupted, vibrato.

And on a Japanese visit in “Kyoto” the speaker defines himself as being “found in unremarkable rooms of longing, / as itinerant”. It’s worth noting of these poems of transit that they never glamorise the state, turning it into a fashionable, gypsy-like existence: it’s simply that of an imprecisely defined self.

There are also poems which, as I said in the introduction, are either based on personal experience or the experience of imagined characters which resonate with the author. In “Roof” we are on a building site and the speaker is loading roof tiles on to a belt which raises them to the roof. It chimes with some of the other poems (“Dreamboat” or “North” from The Hostage) in its interest in “ascension”. In “Cuckoo” a couple of workers put up with ethnic abuse and “Spit” is an odd poem – with an awful lot of allegorical possibilities – describing spitting out of a car window. I read these as poems about created characters, rather than autobiographical pieces, partly because a poem of this type from The Hostage, “Palm Tree Neighbourhood”, names both its characters – itinerant car-washers – as Tibe and Dino. More likely to be autobiographical are the four poems called “Zdrillo, 1989” – “I am three. Stationed and waiting / where my first and last name belongs / in Croatia” – and “Translating His English into English”, a poem which hinges on one of English’s many synonyms – pinchbar/crowbar.

Occasionally there are glimpses of a more conventional way of looking at the self through descriptions of a relationship. I’m especially taken by “by” which suddenly seems to launch us into a poetic world we are familiar with. It begins, “by now we could not postpone / the arrival of sorrow / by cherry blossoms we took it / home and fed it fairy floss” but finishes by saying that the couple could not decide whom it belonged to, it “seemed wrong / to split sorrow between us”. This belongs to the mode of elegant imaginativeness that I always associate with Central European poetry and perhaps Latin American poetry. It’s a godsend to translators because the elegant conception is usually expressed in simple denotative words and can be easily shifted across into another language. But it isn’t a mode that deals much with perspectives on the self, it always seems to transcend anything personal. I think “Borders” is one of these poems:

notice how those great
clouds hang
well over the skyline – rain
perfectly timed
not a single drop
out of place

though its title might suggest allegorical interpretations dealing with cultural borders and differences. I quote this poem just to show that In Your Dreams can’t be said to limit itself entirely to perspectives on the self. There is another completely puzzling poem, “Maritime”:

I eat the soft meat
of barbecued snapper
basted in olive oil
I pile a messy stack
the spinal cord
barbecued skin, tiny
bits of garlic
parsley, lemon seed

which is interesting in what seems its very refusal to invite or tolerate allegorical readings. Perhaps it’s a test for readers like something that might turn up on an exam paper. In that case I would probably fail, though if pressed I would try to come up with reading it as being about – Persephone-like – eating the food of a foreign world and being trapped there: a “reading” which would put a lot of emphasis on that last word, “seed”.

At any rate, finally there is that difficult opening poem to worry about. It has a cryptic title, “Or”:

We have a memory cut
from the scuff of shoes, a muted sob

to keep the sadness blank,
the door open long after goodbye.

We have a common phrasebook
pulled from yesterday’s jumble,

names that decorate faces,
all those lovely names you gave.

We have a night of good dreams
followed by a night of darker themes.

Between the walls now a refrain
scorched by one long vowel,

how you turn on the superego,
the one with the ear to hear

the murmur on the other side
of these words, what they say.

It’s manifestly a poem of separation but it could just as well be the separation of two parts of the self as a couple breaking up. In any case it tells us of hidden meanings of apparently simple statements about the self. It’s a reminder that another poem in the book, “Sample”, finishes, “I give myself away too easily in tiny free samples. / You’re right to be suspicious, there’s a catch”.