Radić Brankica: Crvena

Brankica Radić: Crvena

The book of poems by Brankica Radić Crvena takes the reader in a traveling way into the cross-border spaces of poetry, leads to countries that live their present, modernity and future as past time, as a past that persistently returns in new forms and old contexts. Red. What or which red? The one that symbolically hovers over the states that disappeared before the onslaught of the so-called free world? The one that rises as a melancholic sorrow for the loss of a great history, a great story? Or, let's hope, the language of poetry is just a simple "step in the landscape". The poetess on the train, in the speed of sharp, strong and simple words, verses, creates sequences that are spread over official stations, borders, or in intimate doubts, disagreements and doubts. A poet in search, from excursionist to fateful, with signs of oblivion and unexpected figures by the wayside, sometimes far from herself, sometimes far from others... How do voices multiply in the time of reading (and writing), in the unfathomable flow of "others and different"? Red is at the place of controversy and difference, where (political) games have replaced the living and the dead, moved them into poverty and misery, into a state of hibernation and the incomprehensibility of one's own face... It is not just a matter of a stoppage at the Romanian border or in another more exotic place, on Baikal, for example, or where it already ends up in the past and present, where fate is dealt like cards are dealt, where, as it is written, "history will be ours". Read and experienced, breathing, lateness, old and new map of the world are the obsessive cells of Brankica Radić's poetic interest, her movement that lasts in a lyrical and narrative conglomerate. At the beginning (how did it all begin?) and at the end of the non-existent time is a dangerous game: "Đokare. Đirare. Don't stop. That scrabble. In my / head. Someone might understand. I write differently. / I delete. I flip the letters. The solution is close. Absolutely. / I know. If I go crazy one more time. It will be easier for me". Before we reach the final page-station of Red, let's not forget that, above all, it is about freedom and resistance, no matter how close we are to the chaos of the world. But what about those insights? What about that knowledge? Could it be easier for the one who travels and writes, for the one who reads, after all?