‘Boundary Situation’ (‘Granichna Sostojba) is a poetry collection that principally cautions by directing our gaze to the centre of the world’s open sores. The blade-sharp verses, dissect the current political and social bleedings, bring to our attention all doubts and unfortunate decisions, and shower us with views of historical sufferings which, unfortunately, taught no lessons to the current military and political madness.
This anthological book of poetry deals with three extremely important themes divided into three parts: Time, Decay and Humanity/Man. In all three works, Dimkovska ontologically analyses human existence, yet shorn of the unnecessary transcendentalism, but in the now and here, with a sharpness of verse that brings to mind the great Wislawa Szymborska. Her lyrics not only caution but also open up controversies and evoke rivers of dilemmas. Interestingly, this brilliant poet enters into a philosophical debate, but with a verse full of dynamics and action so that the depth of all her verses is precisely in their subtextual visualization.
The last two poetry collections of Lidija Dimkovska, including this one, pose a very polemical question: How engaged is the poetry of this significant Macedonian poetess? The lyric coordinate of ‘Boundary Situation’ speaks of the deep connection of this poet’s poems with the global humanist movements in the world. This poetry collection is a charter, permeated by all crucial manners of disintegration of the human civilization. It seems as if this very poetry collection encapsulates her deep intellectual urge to expose the mechanisms of the decay of the human habitus, and thus of its entire environment, to perceive the agonising absurdity that distracts us from logic and consequence, leaving us on your own, and loneliness is the bed of alienation. Dimkovska very bravely and decisively appeals to historical blunders and fatal inconsistencies, to deliberate destructions whose memories are difficult to erase, to warn both the elite and rank and file that the political mimicry behind false humanism is, in fact, prime cancer – a civilizational sore. Civilization and the humanistic context are mentioned multifold, and this brave and determined poet places her engagement at the top of her literary thought. With the three parts of this anthological poetry collection, Lidija Dimkovska completes another cycle of her poetic work, in which, the cry permeates along the same tectonics as the smile, and the joy is burdened by the sadness. Yes, she very directly cautions of the disintegration of the world, to remind us of a crucial issue running through her entire poetic gamut through very thin nothing – love:
‘At the verge of consciousness
He knows: that not even beauty saved him, and poets in vain
wanted to change him. And suddenly, he remembers, between the bones and the skin
A love thirst: to be able to make love with freedom at least once.”
(‘The Falling World’)
Finally, the dilemma that opens this poetry collection is deeply sensitive and extremely philosophical. This is not the only poetry collection in which Dimkovska dissects this phenomenon, namely: ‘Man or Humanity’, not ‘Man and Humanity’. This leads us to hold the conclusion that the last poetry collection “Threshold Position” both from an aesthetic and philosophical, relates to both her past and future poetry collections, as a coordinate – bringing another engagement closer, and that is ‘the human alienation’. Every urge to dominate alienates man from man, every misperceived domination gives rise to dystopia and definitively delegitimizes man as a reflexive being, thereby rendering his entire environment unusable. Disintegration is as well, in a sense, news of a new ascension. In her poems, the poetess also talks about a certain hope in which, as Orwell says: ‘He who controls the past controls the future, while he who controls the present controls the past.’ Namely, the eternal reflexive oscillations of man between yesterday and tomorrow is a signpost for the existence of what is also eternally incomprehensible ‘today’. This anthological poetry collection searching through the ‘past indefinite time’ and dissecting the ‘humanity of man’ shows us a ‘Roadmap’ purposed not for walking towards something, but which should somehow be placed in our secret thoughts to prevent the obvious from being overshadowed:
‘It’s BC again
and your ancestors shoot with iron spears,
the old is overwhelmed by the new, the new is old.
You want to get out, but there is no pointer,
and one wrong step takes you aeons back.
A bee flies from the Golden Mask.’
(‘Roadmap’)