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We also encounter this journey from a realistic tangibility toward a poetic picture between the lines of Simovic's play. His earlier plays, Hasanaginica and The Shargan Miracle, were written in verse, but a verse that strongly resembles everyday speech. The verse is dry, almost bare of any poetical embellishments, where contemporary turns of phrase and language are often encountered. Only if we were to attempt to write the same text in prose, would we realise that this is, in fact, verse whose rhythm is quite different from that of prose. And even though The Travelling Troupe Sopalovic is written in prose, we cannot but sense, in its rhythm, the beat of a verse, and it is a kind of prose which quite naturally, in key moments, concentrates and thickens into verse. At times the verse is borrowed: in the play's climax, Filip speaks the monologue of Orestes from Electro by Euripides. At other times it is the human misery and despair which cannot but scream out in verse: when she finds out that her son had been arrested, that he could at any moment fall into the hands of Drobac to be tortured, Gina says: How can I say that I know him if I do not know his suffering? -these verses are burnt into our memory alongside the famous verses spoken by the Girl of Kosovo. Sometimes it is Drobac, describing in verse all the details of his horrible art. Just as in drama life and art become one in their most extreme, so does prose begin to flow into verse at these two farthest reaches of human experience: in the horrors of bottomless pits and the highest of heights. Jovan Hristic From the book Ljubomir Simovic - Putujucepozoriste Sopalovic Collection: Savremena jugoslovenska drama br. 22 Publisher: Sterijino pozorje, Novi Sad 1986. POET AND PLAYWRIGHT LJUBOMIR SIMOVIC Since the publication of his first book of poems Slovenske elegije (Slavonic elegies) in 1958, published by Klub uzickih studenata, Simovic has published various books of poetry: Veseli grobovi (Merry graves - 1961), Poslednja zemlja (The Last Country - 1964), Slemovi (Helmets - 1967), Uoci trecih petlova (Before the Third Cocks ' crow - 1972), Subota (Saturday - 1976), Vidik na dve vode (A Two-Slopes View - 1980), Urn za morem (A Mind to Sea - 1 982), Deset obracanja Bogorodici Trojerucici hilandarskoj {Ten Prayers to the Virgin Troyeruchica ofChilandar - 1983), Istocnice (Easterlings - 1983), Gornji grad (Uptown - 1990, published twice in the same year), Igla i konac (Needle and Thread - 1992), Ljuska od jajeta (Eggshell - 1998), Таска (Full Stop - 2004). Amongst a number of selections of his poems, the most important are: Hieb iso (Bread and Salt - Kolo srpske knjizevne zadruge, 1985,1987), Istocnice I druge pesme (Easterlings and Other Poems - 1994), Ucenje и mraku (Learning in the Dark - 1995), compiled by the poet himself, as well as Najlepse pesme Ljubomira Simovica (Greatest Poems by Ljubomir Simovic - selected by Aleksandar Jovanovic (2002), i Sreda и subotu (Wednesday on a Saturday), selected by Branko Kukic (also 2002).