The Kosovo Albanian poet, Ali Podrimja (1942-2012), is considered by many to be the most typical representative of modern Albanian verse in Kosovo and is certainly the Kosovo poet with the widest international reputation. His verse is compact in structure, and his imagery is direct, terse and devoid of any artificial verbosity. Every word counts. The present selection of verse is designed to provide the reader with an overview of the poetic evolution of Ali Podrimja. It touches upon the early years of dynamic optimism in the 1960s, visits the haunts of anguish and personal solitude in the 1970s and 1980s, and brings the reader inevitably to the apocalyptic 1990s in Kosovo during which the recusant voice of the poet was more indispensable than ever.