The language of poetry is the language of love and beauty, of loss and pain. We live in a world that is a kind of symphony of fear and horror. Although Urošević has no illusions that poetry has the power to prevent the dehumanization of today’s world and the current turbulences on a planetary scale (wars, refugee crises, ecological disasters, monstrous experiments in biotechnological and computer laboratories and the like), he believes in the “hidden power” of poetry and in the prophetic role of the poet. As his poem “Gossip” shows: “He leads moles on a mine tour, / he is a scarecrow in love with lightning. / He carries an explosive device in his pocket / timed to go off after three centuries; he is a poet.”
A poet of Vlada Urošević’s size, not succumbing to any literary trends and fashions, from one poetry book to the next, continues to respond to the challenge of the still unseen and unexperienced, expanding the horizons of poetry. His latest, 11th poetry book “Incomprehensible Laboratory” (2019), is a sign of the poet’s subtle sense of the potential rhymes between order and adventure; it testifies to the poet’s learning and erudition on the one hand, and it is hedonistically immersed in the sea of sensory perceptions, on the other. Regarding sensory stimuli, Urošević has emphasized on several occasions the importance of the change of seasons and changes in nature, the feeling of smells, tastes, and even of tactile experiences because, though they are apparently vast and physical, they open the gates to a metaphysical essence of our existence, pointing to the circular flow of life and death, to their dialectics and cyclicity. For this poet, “the riddle is the primordial form of poetry”; it is the enigma, the mystery of the universe and of human existence as an eternal tie between Eros and Thanatos, which is the obsessive longing, universal and deeply humanistic in its essence that ripples the creative voyage of Urošević. His poetic effort aims at discovering the world’s riddle – the essence of life, and similarly to the alchemists, it is a never-ending process because in the end it is still a secret, a question, a riddle…
The cosmic resonance of Vlada Urošević’s poetry, with their exceptional crystallized expression (from “restlessness in the landscape” to “starry orchards”), with their mythopoetic energy he draws from his imagination and with their universally poetic thought on the human condition under the stars complete the mosaic of humanity’s eternal poetry, which exists to convey the spiritual constants, the sameness in the midst of difference, the miraculous duration of perishable and transitory forms through time. Poetry is a heavenly reflection of Earth’s face, and our tonight’s crown bearer, the poet Vlada Urošević, is the earthly reflection of the starry poetic sky. Moreover, as Lyubomir Levchev, the winner of the Golden Wreath Award of the Struga Poetry Evenings wrote in 2010: “Urošević is one of the last miracle workers in the world’s realm of poetry.”
Translated into English by Vladimir Cvetkoski