Which is why we need this book to remind us once again that we need not just promotional, but also regular, critical, comparative and analytical reading and rereading of poetry, because that is the only way we will have an overview of the real situation, as well as more adequate criteria for valuing the poetical achievements produced in our time.
If you focus on the selection (primarily of the authors) made in the book that you have in your hand, you shall conclude that the editor when making those choice did not rely too much on statistics such as the number of published books, or received literary awards, or received platitudes as the main selection criteria (unlike many other collections). The editor has been steadfast to the principle of showcasing only poets whose verses, based on literary criteria, have been deemed worthy of reading and acknowledgment. This is probably the reason why certain authors (deliberately) have not been included in this edition, despite the fact that in the period after year 2000 they have published more books that most of the authors represented here, as well as received literary awards, yet they failed to impress on us that they were ready to make the necessary “sacrifices” at the altar of the esthetic…
That is why we need the Voices of the New Century to underscore the notion that when evaluating/assessing literary works and literature in general, we should not rely on criteria which (in our current Macedonian context) are not always literary-based. We need this book to also show us through its process of selection of authors that you cannot equate quality with quantity in poetry and literature in general. More often than not, a single poem can deserve greater attention than whole shelves of papers bound with names on their covers preserving feeble attempts to write poetry…
Certainly, this edition should maybe include some additional authors, but I am convinced that the editor has adequate reasons for not including them. Just as much as he has valid arguments for each of the selected poets! Between the covers of this book we do indeed find a sorely needed edition which can provide an impetus for a more studious and comprehensive approach to reading, evaluating and interpreting Macedonian poetry in our century. This is an edition that can make us realize that this past period of the 21st century is not small or short with regards to literary production, especially concerning poetry. We need it in order to show us that we have to stop viewing the poetic works created in the past twenty years as just a novelty, we cannot interpret the new poetics occurring in modern Macedonian poetry as just a matter of experiment. Quite the contrary, we should view them and assess them in the wider context of Macedonian poetry, as well as in the context of the latest trends in European and/or world poetry.
There may be some complaints about the fact why the authors (with the exception of those that are sadly no longer with us) have selected the poems with which they/we are represented in this collection. However, we also need this book as a veritable test for the self-awareness of most of the leading Macedonian poetic voice of the new century. A “test” not only of their/our creative maturity, but of their readiness to have a realistic view of their “poetic” selves in the diachronic context of Macedonian literature. There may be others begrudging why only this “category” of authors from the 21stcentury is covered and not authors who have reached their creative peak in the last century, but are still actively writing and publishing the past two decades… Yet, we need this book to serve at least as an initial step in the process of gaining a real insight of the development of contemporary Macedonian poetry in the new century, to ascertain how the new poetical strategies, the different thematic challenges and poetical images reach new dimensions and integrate themselves on the vertical axis of Macedonian poetry, something which the “older generations” of poets who are not “represented” here have already accomplished…
Furthermore, not only do we need this book, but it’s also necessary in order to properly deconstruct the term “literary generation” in the context of this new time, of our times. We need it to illustrate the point that in today’s Macedonian literary space, at least when it comes to poetry, we no longer can speak of new “literary generations” in the same sense this term was used when we are discussing Macedonian poets who earned their literary “legitimacy” up to the beginning of the 1980’s. We also need it to come to the conclusion when we read it that there is no manifest connection between the selected poets around a shared poetic and esthetic platform, nor is there is any sense of unity that would suggest they belong to a common, unique and new stylistic formation.