The first thing that struck me on picking up Tatjana Lukic’s posthumous collection, la, la, la, is the impressive appearance of this Five Islands Press publication. High-quality production hasn’t always been a feature of this press, but it is now under the new publishing team. Lukic’s volume joins other attractive collections by poets such as Louise Oxley, Barry Hill and Judy Johnson.

While Lukic had published a number of collections in the former Yugoslavia, la, la, la is her first book in English and, unfortunately, her last; she died in August 2008. Written after a ten-year silence, this is a fractured book, but one that strives to mend the gaps in experience. The most notable fissure concerns the tensions of life in Yugoslavia during its break-up in the 1990s. Those poems revolving around this social, cultural and political upheaval are the strongest and most consistent in the book. This isn’t surprising; this material is powerful medicine for a poet with Lukic’s eye for what is ‘tough, tender, resilient’, as Laurie Duggan writes in his blurb.