A BULLED MOON

Author - Jovica Ivanovski

Nabildana Mesechina is a selection of 135 poems by the author Jovica Ivanovski, born in 1961, who has been poetically active for twenty-five years, with fourteen published poetry collections and sung in fifteen languages.

Almost all previous critical reviews of Jovica's poetry are focused on two of her characteristics. The first is precisely its urbanity, or thematic situation in the city (now Skopje) as a chronotope in which the poet lives. Thus, Bogomil Gjuzel says that these verses have an "authentically urban sensibility", and Elizabeta Sheleva concludes that "Jovica Ivanovski's poetry is the fruit of a continuous urban adultery with one space". Olivera Ćorveziroska says about this Skopje domesticity that "the songs of Jovica Ivanovski... are ancient residents of Skopje", and Vlatko Galevski says that "Jovica's poetry is like the first versed museum of the defeats of a city, of its inhabitants". The second feature of this poetry, which seems to catch the eye of critics, is what Dusko Krstevski calls the "metonymic" style of writing, i.e. narrative, telling, even epic, as opposed to the "metaphorical," i.e. the lyrical, largely abstract style). All critics define these two things not only as ascertained features of Jovica's overall oeuvre, but (or above all) as essential qualities that separate this poetry from a large part of contemporary Macedonian poetic production.

This selection is significant because it comes out exactly in the year which is the author's jubilee – a quarter of a century of his work.