4. Journey Four: Passage to India
The Poem sequence “La Vita Nuova“, although additionally corresponds with Dante’s work with its epigraph is, in fact “an emotional autobiography” of our poet inspired by his travels through India. Subsequently, India and his unique meeting with its distant, ancient culture and civilization in Celestial Pantomime, is paralleled with Dante’s meeting with Beatrice. Therefore, despite the fact that evidently Zoran Ančevski belongs to the so-called “nomadic poets”, he is also, like Antaeus, deeply rooted in his own soil. He resembles the banyan, the Indian national tree, for which, in the poem with the same title, he says: “You are a Prometheus bound to the skies, / but fettered with a living chain to the ground”.
Thus, not surprisingly, the following poem sequence “Nocturnal Houses and Elegies” is a symbol of homecoming, but it is a return to some already forgotten national values, such as the deserted houses (some of them, ironically, proclaimed as being “of cultural importance”) in the villages of Krushevo, Vitolishte, Braychino, Galichnik, etc.
5. Journey Five: Ars Poetica
The final poem sequence in Celestial Pantomime is entitled as “Strong Songs” and is of crucial importance for Zoran Ančevski’s ars poetica. In his previous poetry collections, such as Wild Peace (2004), our poet wrote serious, engagé, degagé, illiterate, new, adolescent, handicapped… poems. The previous series has been added one more kind of a poem: strong poem. The “strong poem” is a life-giving elixir to this book, and it is perhaps the poem which talks about the unlimited and unhindered poetic endeavour?! For, to a poet such as Zoran Ančevski, only heaven could be a limit.