Night Thoughts

The poems in Volume Iii of the Collected Works can be grouped quite naturally under the heading of either darkness or light. There is plenty of material on the dark side to invite despair: but Kotcheff does not succumb to that temptation. Instead, he chooses to enlist with life and ride under the banner of Life and Love and Beauty. Among the selections included in Volume Iii are: the poignant story of a young boy's love for a precocious and eccentric work horse; haunting memories of a summer spent working in an abattoir; a vignette of a young man and an older woman whose two souls are transmuted into one through music; tales of unspeakable cruelty dredged from Kotcheff's ancestral Bulgarian past; the magical beauty of myriads of pure white butterflies convening for regeneration.