Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman, the latest collection by Bosnian expat Goran Simic, is as much a departure as it is a continuance. In this book, we find the world-renowned poet visiting familiar themes in fresh ways. Not only is Simic now writing in English, but many of these poems also embrace the constraints of rhyming quatrains. Simic seems to comment on this in on of those poems, "Walking Backwards": "When I asked the old frames to embrace me freshly cast, / I was walking backwards. And I was dead wrong." But what wehave here is a middle-aged poet rising like a phoenix from the ashes of his past, moving forward with power and precision, forging new frames and speaking, as always, with an exiled voice as doubtful as it is authoritative.

Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952 and has published eleven volumes of poetry, drama and short fiction; his work has been translated into nine languages and has been published and performed in several European countries. One of the most prominent writers of the former Yugoslavia, Simic was trapped in the siege of Sarajevo. In 1995 he and his family were able to settle in Canada as the result of a Freedom to Write Award from PEN. Immigrant Blues is Simic`s second full-length volume of poems in English, and the first to be published in Canada.

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