A number of the poems in Lidija Cvetkovic’s first book stem from revisiting places and people in the war-torn country of her birth, the former Yugoslavia, but the poetry springs from an interrelated heritage. An Eastern European sensibility guides this poetry, informing and being informed by laconic Australian understanding. Poems that speak of ethnic and regional conflict, and of self, lovers and family in two continents, are woven into the same breath; and as the inexplicable in human experience is measured, a quiet celebration of human resilience can be heard.

The title poem wrestles with the complexities of conflict. Carefree summers are remembered, yet this recollection is deftly expanded through the imagery of figs, ‘huge and fragile’: ‘Once, fig in hand for a friend, across the stones / I twisted my ankle and fell. / The fig split open like a heart in my palm.’ From antiquity, figs have been a fruit of sustenance: here, the forceful tearing open of the heart-shaped fig resonates to the destruction of a people and a nation: ‘Now I want to retrace my steps … / but I hear they’ve shifted the stones / built walls.’ Segregation is questioned and mourned, ‘segregate by blood / and god and name’ marking the extent to which kinship and faith – the heart of common life – feature in this battleground. The final stanza of the poem surprisingly diverts into a hard and ironic play: