Jovanka Vukanović's new book: On You with Transience

At no point are we clear whether our history does not allow us to escape from ourselves, or whether we ourselves must not and cannot escape from the past in which we walked

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Jovanka Vukanović, Photo: Svetlana Mandić
Jovanka Vukanović, Photo: Svetlana Mandić
Disclaimer: The translations are mostly done through AI translator and might not be 100% accurate.

Although the new poetic manuscript Jovanka Vukanović Nothing arrives on time can rightly be experienced as a continuation of her poetic walk Passersby, it seems that the author has made a new and important step forward when it comes to the philosophical experience of personal and collective fullness and roundness, which she tries to subject to a detailed examination with her poetry. This is imposed by the nature of things when a man, a poet, is faced with deposits of experience that need to be reaffirmed in the context of a new reality. As nothing and no one arrives on time, so the poetess, in waiting as an exclusive constant, has no intention of pandering to transience as the only lasting thing. Vukanović decides to go with this collection of anthology verses and Ti with Transience. He approaches her without fear, powerfully and dignified, as befits a woman whose creativity stands defiantly above the gaping jaws of the abyss that invites us to be meaningless.

Tortured by her, tied to the tree of the past a rope from sight for the sake of the roots, for the sake of salvation, the poetess detects the dromological flare-up that is inexorably approaching. He sings in spite of everything, in the name of everyone. Vukanović is aware that being silent means unequivocally - to be defeated.

It took us too/But we looked back/For a long time/With a rope from our eyes/We tied it/So that we wouldn't be silent/Saying the names out loud ("I would call you")

Clearly and precisely, Jovanka Vukanović makes an appeal to the reader in order to better understand the ever-new concept of time that hangs over his head like a sword and advocates him until the end for which he began to prepare on the day of his birth. Her understanding of transience goes into many levels and chambers from which answers to secrets that will never be solved are drawn. As a civilization, we are stuck in the past, in ourselves, in the past... At no point are we clear whether our history does not allow us to escape from ourselves, or whether we ourselves must not and cannot escape from the past in which we walked , walked, and in which, if we look a little closer, we are still walking.

Don't throw away the old lady/In her wormhole/We walked/Walked/Check/Maybe we're still in ("Don't throw away the old stuff")

The poet appeals not to throw away old things because in her dust we play the round and look forward to life, so this poetry is also a magic circle from which we neither want nor can get out.

By reading the collection Nothing arrives on time one gets the impression that the poet Jovanka Vukanović creates on the border of worlds and that it is precisely this atmosphere of division, which always seeks to break the whole and a full, perfect circle, that made her poems dominated by borders, thresholds, points, borders... Each of these motifs rush to the reader and almost every one can be understood as a new wall. A song New walls begins with the lines: Barbarians came/ Bigger than us/ And walled us up, as if it clearly sets a boundary that makes a multiple division: into smaller and larger barbarians, but also into barbarians and those who are not. At the end of the same song, we sense a threat:

When we are/Building new walls/There will be no barbarians/Who will come out of them.

The author writes down many verses on her doorstep (which, due to circumstances, is no longer hers, but ours!), striking, powerful, without a hint of pathos and its derivatives. Such and such an author's threshold comes to us, conquers us, crosses all our thresholds, those within us and those around us. By some unusual, magical path, quite easily and imperceptibly, we all (pro)find ourselves at her - our doorstep. History, not official, but individual, our personal, is brought before our feet as a form of self-confrontation and self-confrontation. He passes sounds through his ears, fills his eyes with images. Everything becomes Blue, in which we have never been and in which we may never be, but which will not be less because of that fact our.

Even in moments that are full of emotion, which are fertile ground for the softness of pathos, Jovanka Vukanović sings soberingly, masterfully avoiding all obstacles and traps:

If I don't defend myself, neither Marko Kraljević will help ("In Plavno")

The poet knows that the decisive battle is possible only within herself, and that all the battlefields outside become food for the monster that kundera he calls the unbearable lightness of existence. An encounter with the poetry of Jovanka Vukanović represents the possibility of discovering oneself in the strangest places and through the most unusual methods. Her poetic struggle with herself arose from the fear that the search for the continuation of the story would be meaningless. Therefore, he walks on a side road, winding paths of meaning and an endless poetic horizon, in the contemplation of which we all die. Her latest lyrics they soothe the reader, convincing him that it is pointless to look for solutions in reality, which only means that one infinity flows into another.

Collection Nothing arrives on time it compresses the atmosphere of anxiety contributed by walls, borders, points of separation, all kinds of barriers and thresholds. For the author, these are the dimensions and intermediate spaces in which, in fact, life itself is played out and waiting as its armature. In that vacuum, in which whispers and ignorance reign, the lives of those who are not aware of the fact that their expiration date has long since expired, as beautifully stated in the film "Borders", are lived.

The anthology poem "As if time is a yard" talks about the limits that man sets for himself, so the author expresses her rebellion and misunderstanding of the statement be in your own time, and therefore asks - Will you be in your yard?

It is evident that there is no way out: he cannot go back, and there is nowhere to go forward, and to find yourself in that habit means to be deceived, to be stolen from life. Against this background, in the poetic work "Nemaš kud" Vukanović gives a thoughtfully intriguing and deep sketch of the relationship between life and time, where he says that whatever life brings in time, it takes away in time. Everything that Jovanka Vukanović touches in her lyrics is checked, which contributes to the feeling of anxiety, but also the hope of freedom of choice, which is not an illusion.

In her universe, memories come in flocks, and in the war with doubts, it is an advantage to be late for the goal. Nobody and nothing arrives on time. Everything that the poets offer has long been domesticated.

In the song Deliverance we encounter the Nietzschean motif of the abyss and the phenomenon of staring into it. Encountering nothingness, with zero and chasing, the poet wins by singing, succeeding in this way to open the door to optimism and let the ray of creative light cut through the darkness. By singing, the author creates the meaning of staring into the abyss, singing that makes your head explode:

Just/When I start/If I fall/If I don't have to/Beg for forgiveness/And flatter/Non-existent deliverance. (Deliverance)

In the mentioned verses, we notice a violent note of black humor that makes us wonder about all the offers of deliverance that we as a civilization have managed to create. Poet Vukanović doesn't stop there when it comes to going above and beyond with meaning. He sees how time plays with our essence: We him a drawing/He us a blank paper ("Time")

This is not the end of the game. To a word, time responds with a dot, and to a song - with a cry. The word, she states, does not resist time. For Vukanović it is cunning giver of eternity before whom we kneel with our hands outstretched to receive gifts that no one has ever been able to receive. While we wait for gifts, we unconsciously agree to race with life: It's not me/Death has overtaken me/I've been overtaken/Life has overtaken me. (“Age”)

A special part of the collection is occupied by cycles in which the author tries to reveal to herself and others some secret of the magic of creation, so she speaks clearly and intimately, first-hand, about the very act of writing, but also her own experience of creation and encounter with creation. He manages to incorporate all this into the story of duration and meaning, allowing himself to undergo a kind of deep introspection through his own verse in which the reader is not just a mere observer, but an active participant and a kind of creator. And what after/

I don't write a poem/I don't publish a book/And I fear death/Like the black devil ("There is little that can be done")

For Vukanović, we mitigate the sudden gaps by pulling threads from one point to another, we always want to bring the beginning to the end. As jurors, we follow invisible patterns that have been left to us from time immemorial. In the song He is not a swallow man the author concludes that, unlike the swallow, which is at the mercy of the Creator and therefore has two skies, two houses, two lives, and all four corners of the world under its wings, man cannot take a single step without being (mis)sinful: And a man/If he only takes a step/He has already stood in someone's way/.

A collection of poetry Nothing arrives on time it unlocked the worlds within us, hidden and threatened by the false lights of everyday life, freeing us from our fears. In this regard, we can state with empirical verifiability that, thanks to poets such as Jovanka Vukanović, looking into the abyss of transience has become less scary.

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