Poetry
Ватра и ништа
Not translated into English
Branko Miljković · 1960
Synopsis
Poems built on few words and many returns: fire, ash, nothing, the word that burns the one who speaks it. The verse is regular, the vocabulary narrow, and each piece takes up the images of the previous one while shifting them a notch, in the manner of a thought searching for itself. Fire there destroys and brings knowledge at once, as in Heraclitus, whom the poet claimed as his own.
Context
The collection appeared in 1960, the same year as another book by the author, three years after his debut. He died a few months later, and an epitaph of a single line, in which he says he was killed by a word too strong, has fixed his legend. Commentators constantly link his work to philosophy, to Nietzsche as to Heraclitus. His works were collected in Niš in 1972, and his grave receives his admirers every year.
Who it is for
A short collection, in a tight and abstract language. It helps to know that the author read the pre-Socratics and held the poem to be a form of thought.
Prizes and reception
The central collection of a poet who, according to critics, took a high place in Serbian poetry faster than any other since the war.