(Rastko Šejić, KADA PLIVAŠ, Prometej, Novi Sad, Matica Boke, Šta hoćeš, Belgrade 2023)
Rastka Sejić I met him as one of the participants of the regionally famous series "Na veslu priča" in 2019 and gained a strong impression of his true belonging to the coast. I felt that we share a similar love, but also bitterness due to the devastation of these spaces and the drowning of beautiful ambient units in a kind of urban chaos.
This summer I received his poem "When you swim", created from moments of sublime enjoyment by the sea and in the sea and from an expressive and painful criticism of what the coast is slowly turning into.
Šejić recognized and found Boka as a unique point of knowledge and as his space of happiness. This does not exclude a collision with all the dangers that threaten that space from everywhere. That is why faith is needed for the struggle to continue to make sense:
You give yourself the right
To forgive yourself and the world
Unforgivable
Because there is no fight
No faith
In people
The method of resistance is also Šejić's hedonism and ability to enjoy the moment, to surrender to it and, figuratively speaking, drink the "glass of the moment to the bottom":
You realize that intelligence
It's not resourcefulness
Already the ability to enjoy the world
In his writings, Šejić marvels at the timeless landscapes of Bokeš, but also at the immediate scenes of life - seaside "seagulls" that make a "primal cry", sometimes steal hydrophores and slyly probe, he marvels at the tattoos of bathers, kayla, "heated corpses strewn on the sand", the conquering Russians , girls who do not recognize the primal feeling that the sea evokes and easily exchange it for a preserved hairstyle and a gossip column... It is precisely in such details that you can see how accurate it is, as noted by the critic Željko Komnenović, a comparison of Rastko Šejić's poem with canvases Voj Stanić.
Šejić also has a rare sense of humor, whether he defends the turtles that are mating or listens to the locals who are setting up baskets and talking:
About world politics
And all personally
By name
As if they were
Swallowed baits
In the lyrical units, Šejić reveals how the coast is slowly changing, how the former rhythms and tastes of life are disappearing, with the exception of the unchanging sea in the cleft of the mountains through which one can imagine antediluvian lava streams. Nevertheless, he chooses faith over surrender:
Evil in people is not worth it
The right words
You feel too much
It is obvious the daily need of a poet, an intellectual, a simple man, not to be indifferent and to offer resistance. Along with the verses about how in old cities every "niche turns into a bar" there is also a reference to the famous Njegoshev verse: "Let the fight be unceasing".
In one poetic unit, the lyrical subject is a diver who dives to the limits of his breath, attracted by the deceptive glow of precious things on the seabed:
You understand the Indian's disappointment
Who cut himself
Unusable
A shard of glass
And gave the land
For shine
Star
Fainting.
The coast that Šejić shows looks more and more like random debris. The landscape is "bleeding" while ugly solitaires, cheap and unimaginative construction made of iron, glass and concrete crowd out the tame Mediterranean ambience.
A seaside town
With a serious disorder
Urban smarts
Where is there no place?
Except for the human mass
For his poetic expression, Šejić chooses free verse, almost without any punctuation. How to swim in that labyrinth of verses depends on the reader. The poet gives him the opportunity to share the intensity of what he experienced. Marga's silences follow the rhythm of the sea and strokes. It is not a programmed athlete swimming with a practiced rhythm of movement. He swims and dives attentively, an observer of nature, people, the world and its changes in love with the sea and Bokeš area.
Readers will choose songs that are more suitable to their sensibility, their experience of the sea and "swimming". For some, it will be universal, expressive, surprising representations of experiences that they themselves can remember if they had close encounters with the sea and this coast. The rustling of the rain, the bales of sea grass cut by Poseidon, the wall splashing forward, the swimmer following his line until it escapes and leaves a magnificent rainbow, entering the icy sea after a storm, then quickly returning, and "the hot sand of the beach feels like crushed ice "; creepers that grind ancient stone with their sticky tentacles... The lyrical subject feels that the geography has embraced him and is not letting him go ashore.
There is one moment
Complete peace and belonging
Impossible to get used to the sea
She is smarter
Most of the planet
The ability to belong like this, in fact, is not even given to everyone. She is a gift, sometimes a curse of the chosen ones. And when it has already been given to the poet, he says:
It's a shame
Yes, all your senses
They are not sharpened
When you already have something to feel
It seems to me that the poem "When you swim" could not have been written by a local who spends days and years here, because he would have burst from the intensity of what he experienced. Old sailors, the poet notes, do not swim and their songs are sad:
And they never swim
Out of awe
Because they know very well
The real power of the sea
When he has to explain
Transient transience
Each of the lyrical units will offer the reader some image or detail that they did not expect, and somehow they recognize it in Šejić's verse. Such details are most often powerful insights into the being and transience of things, the world and man:
Sun
Dawning
On the dark side
The open sea
What if
Never
He doesn't come
Do more.
(Speech at the promotion of the book at the Museums and Galleries of Budva, Budva, August 2024)
Bonus video:
