Poetry International recently reviewed
Nikola Madzirov's poetry translation
Remnants of Another Age (BOA, 2011), charging the collection with an "uncanny sense of intimacy ... and, equally, a sense of intimacy to the
uncanny."
The review lists the tools Madzirov uses in his collection to create such an effect: "A penchant for skillful and inevitable repetition and the way each poem is inhabited by this sense of paradox and parallax view ... along with an ease--what seems a superior trust in glancing details to create their implications..."
Futher dissecting these qualities, the review recalls Sigmund Freud's study of the word for better understanding. "As Carolyn Forche puts it in her introduction, '[Madzirov's] surname derives from
madzir or
majir, meaning 'people without a home' ... So Madzirov gives up rootedness and becomes the poet of chance, of fortuitous encounters..."
"Companionable, deja-vu-ish, at once embodied and disembodied, these are poems that know 'Not one illicit digger so far / has found the walls between us...' Born of both gravitas and yearning, they know how to float. It is a cliche ... to say that poems are
luminous and
timeless. Still, these are--thanks ... to both Madzirov and his band of translators, Peggy and Graham W. Reid, Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed. But if they are luminous, they are also shadowy--an equal necessity: in another age. And right now."
Remnants of Another Age is available at the
BOA Bookstore.