Hesitation

"Hesitation" of the young poet Iva Damjanovski imposed an unusual new voice in Macedonian poetry, which is authentic and fresh, incredibly lucid and rhythmic, but with a simple and strong expression. Her lyrics are simultaneously brutally tender and casually contradictory, yet self-aware and deeply musical. They amaze with their childlike naive wisdom, complemented by rhymes and assonances that create an unconventional allusion to suppressed Slavic sadness. The whole collection is compact, and the songs are like naturally carved sculptures, exactly as they should be, and no different, facing the global threats of apocalypticity, which engulfs us all and everywhere. Damjanovski's songs have the courage to convince us that the world is good and that there should be a lot of love, even when we are aware that we do not belong to it at all. It is a pure, innocent and almost childlike view of the world, as immortal as art which is the only hope a man can have. The book "Hesitation" by Iva Damjanovski abounds with minimalistic verses that play with the semantics of words, opening before us a perceptive and incredibly emotional horizon, which may not be so erudite as it is intuitive precisely because of that timeless sensibility that the poetess inherited from Racin and Karamanov (and why not from Peter Handke, who stood before us terrified like a child). That's why in the verses of Iva Damjanovski there is blood and revolt and a burning sun in the sky that colored the remains of all the meanings that the word can give birth to. They are like a silent reinforcement and a loud writing that wanted to reject all verbal molds, to build a stylistic originality that would not harm the emotion. That's why the beauty of her poetry is not so much in the intellectual content of the word, as in a simultaneous, distance-and-approach to all meanings at once. Hidden behind the apparent dissonance of thought, behind the sound and sense of a vocal script that has come close to the genotext of the signifying process, her poetry reveals her troubled self. And finally, if this past year, in the poetic production in the Macedonian language, there is something that can carry the so-used, even worn-out phrase "literary event", then according to the opinion of the jury-commission for awarding the "Brothers Miladinovci" prize, it is certainly the book of the young Iva Damjanovski. As a habitus of a new generation, and at the same time a sensibility that is timeless, as a musicality and intermediality that vibrates on the edges of the poetic expression that is increasingly rushing towards other arts, this book is a proof and a demonstration that the Macedonian language is juicy, alive and quality material from which to build songs that are stimulating to the ear, heart, and thought.

The committee of the award "Brothers Miladinovci", Struga Evenings of Poetry, 2020. (Angelina Banović-Markovska, Sonja Stojmenska-Elzeser, Anastasia Gjurchinova, Nikola Madjirov, Duško Krstevski)