Vlada Urošević’s abovementioned determination had already crystalized in his first collection of poems “Another city” (1959), which had programmatic meaning and grew into a leading (auto)poetic principle, immanent to the author’s overall poetics; in the familiar city, the poet reveals “another kind of city”, a city which, even if non-existent in any geographical map, is no less real, authentic, alive, spiritually enriched. It is a “city in which the Moon / reckons her duty / to shuffle the cards / of the possible and the impossible”, writes the poet in “A full moon night above Skopje.” The ability to reveal unusual points of feeling to notions we consider usual is one of this poet’s most poetic capabilities. In Jacques Gaucheron’s opinion, Urošević possesses the lucid ability “to perceive the invisible in the viscera of the visible world.” As any true great poet, Urošević is able to grasp even the momentous, fleeting beauty of things that surrounds us and that escapes us, analogous to the “sand rose” of his eponymous poem which “grows / perhaps from the wind / perhaps from the shadows of the clouds / blooms in the sand / you will pass by / unable to see it…” The poet is a seismograph of the unknown, unavailable to the common senses.
Vlada Urošević is considered a poet of impressive, wondrous images with accentuated associative power, polysemy and extraordinarily layered richness. In his poetry “It rains like when a woman falls asleep”, “it rains like a miracle”; “A woman opens up the dusk as an umbrella: / featherless birds fall out, marbles and a cantaloupe”, “the tossed newspaper embraces the wind”, “the wind blows / carrying away the landscapes / utility poles, hats and witches on brooms fly”, and “the smell of salt persistently penetrates from somewhere” and the sea sends a word “hundred and one nautical miles away”. The poet enters “the leopard skin stretched out at the bottom of the ocean with moving spots” (what an amazing allusion to Dionysius!) identifies himself with the mythical Minotaur, “half-bull, half-human” who is only a museum exhibition piece, whom “two elderly ladies (…) give a little grass”, while “tourists take pictures”.
In these lines, everything is connected and harmonious in Baudelairean manner: “Musketeers sleep in Indian temples”, “volcanoes spew out mummies and roman coins”, “the train transforms into a somber submarine”, the snakes carry “the patterns of Byzantium”, the Ohrid landscape “goes from yellow to surprise”. The poet’s revealing view defies the rational order, fiddles with logical thinking and with the habitual, gains poetical status and functions adhering to its own rules. Hence an entire specter of incredible phenomena in his poetry: cyclists are “shining meteors”, birds “have leaves instead of wings”, mountains have “fur instead of snow” and fruit – “eyes instead of kernels”; “a star is hidden in each fruit”, “the apricot opens up like the body of a woman”, “the garden” is “an observatory”, and “text on the field – palimpsest”. Furthermore, Skopje’s Stone Bridge “is not made of stone”, but of “amber / and old ivory, slightly tainted / by the ages”; “Daut-Pasha Hamam propels its twelve breasts towards the sky / like an alleged Artemis from Ephesus / that laid to rest”; “The library is a sinking ship”, and monsters “grotesque and appealing”, “beckon from the corners at dusk (…) / obscure the mirrors, crawl through the books, / come alive from the patterns on the carpet”… Urošević’s poetry gives imagination wings, nourishes dreams, and kindles fantasy…
If the search for unusual, dynamic, paradoxical and miraculous sights, the skill to concretize abstract poetic visions and to “defamiliarize” the real topoi and the disparity and intensity of the images themselves, unequivocally lead this author’s poetry beyond its borders – to symbiosis with visual art and to ekphrastic poetry, then in the euphonic nature of his verse and in his tendency to search for sound matches, he approaches magic that builds its incantations, often, on word play, on discovering sound matches and surprises. And while in his youth he was one of the proponents of free verse (when such verse was considered resistance to the officially accepted poetics), Urošević then changed his poetic technique. Often his poetry resembles a kind of “word magic”, hence the secret spell “Enta benta tabur tabar” in “Evening games” and the magical palindrome “Ablanatanalba” in the eponymous poem, or the prophetic words “Mane, tekel, fares”, and the magical refrain “Alf laila va-laila” in “Eulogy / Grievance against the stories of Scheherazade”, as well as the catalogue of childish curiosity in “Lullaby – Dreamcatcher” and many more. “These poems will astound you. In every sense of the word. With their quaint charm and their music”, French poet Pierre Gamaraux declares on Urošević’s verses, which are “an attempt to express the inexpressible”. From a linguistic standpoint, Urošević’s poetical odyssey builds on the belief in the power of speech, much more in its sonorous suggestiveness than in its meaning. On this note, the great Borges says, “There are verses that are wonderful, and yet void of meaning. Still, they do have meaning – not to reason, but to the imagination. There is a pleasure in those words, and, of course, their rhythm, their music. (…) They do not mean anything and are not created with the intention to mean anything; and yet, they function. They function as something wonderful.”
These insights by Borges correspond to some of Urošević’s reflections in his work “Ars poetica”: “Too much rationality is harmful to poetry. For the poem to become and to remain poetry, a certain dose of recklessness is needed, got through play, through turning to chance, through exuberant association, through a kind of verbal trance, through humor to arrive at the regions impermeable by the rational approach.” It is a play that is one of the key postulates and the ultimate creative principle of Vlada Urošević. Not taken as irresponsibility, lack of seriousness or void of meaning, but as a unique adventure of the spirit that leads, in a roundabout way, to serious goals. “Poetry is a naive game with gloomy and infernal abysses standing at its beginning and at its end”, wrote this poet in his early literary years. He has remained consistent to these words until this day. Frequently, the play gets an auto-ironic sound, like the poem “Poet”, which starts with the lines: “Much needed, even necessary / like a parasol in the Antarctic / like a moth in a cabinet with geography maps”.
Poetic luddism is in synergy both with the sense of wondrousness and with free child-like imagination. The Italian romantic Leopardi in his time declared, “children see everything in nothing, and adults – nothing in everything.” For Urošević, our imagination’s roots lie in childhood and every poet (and artist, for that matter) seeks to regain in their works, even for a moment, the ability to discover the world “as if for the first time” because the imaginative panopticon that is the motive of defamiliarization is momentary, but for a child it has the meaning of an entire cosmos. The play between dream and reality, their mutual intertwining and overflow is a constant feature, a neuralgic place in Urošević’s poetry: “Where does the wave take her and who makes her eyes widen / what sight does she see, what wonder – seventh, eighth?” – the lyrical subject is curious in “A sleeping woman”, subtly alluding to the decadent wonders kept by the mineral layers of dreams, considered from a Nervalian perspective as “another life.” Urošević is a rare poet that knows “the dreamer’s secret”, formulated in the verse: “The sleepers are sleeping, / only the dreamers are dreaming. “
If by “the dream’s compass” (as in his eponymous poem) the poet sails on the miraculous plains of the oneiric in a microcosmic plan, with another beloved instrument, the astrolabe, Urošević sets forth in “hunting the unhuntable” to the stars and the universe (the microcosm). Grasping poetry as “an essence of the spirit”, as “an instantaneous revelation that the universe can be comprehended even through a grain of sand”, i.e., that “every sand grain is a cosmos” (sounds like Blake, doesn’t it?!), this poet seeks to draw attention to the presence of the wondrous both up there and down here: “What cosmic flights would discover / is in fact hidden in the contents of the fruit”; “the fruits are planets, the light – their sweetness”, we discover in “Starry orchards”. Through the stars, already introduced in the lines of “The Southern Star” (Invisibility), a connection with the scientific wondrous is made, to which Vlada Urošević, undoubtedly exhibits affinity, corresponding with the cult of knowledge he unselfishly nurtures, with his interest in astronomy and astrology and also for new scientific discoveries. Francis Combe considered his Poems for the 21st century published exactly 30 years ago “almost prophecies”; they “inform the risk of watching as life on Earth ceases: the funeral of a lake, the space tree that no longer bears fruit, the plastic planet with flowers of Sulphur… A world in which all beautiful things are under threat.” In such poems, the poet becomes a bioethical conspirator.