Promised Land

If you savor and enjoy symbolist poetry, such as the ones of Malarme, Verlaine, Rimbaud or the style of the open-verse masters like W. Whitman, T.S. Eliot, Dickinson or the inspired and romantic styles of Wordsworth, Yeats, Plath as well as the poetics of contemporary and avant-garde European poetry philosophically exhilarated by plethora of philosophical insights and ideas, "Promised Land" may as well be a must-read. The book represents a compilation of 28 poems from 4 out of Stefan Markovski's six published poetry books belonging to different poetry styles, poetics and philosophical viewpoints. Some of the poems included in this selection have been selected for anthologies of contemporary poetry, read at festivals and published in literary magazines throughout the world. In an interview, Markovski has once stressed that the essence of almost every author is the endeavor for some kind of change, the change of the surrounding world, which may again genuinely help to (re)define the meaning of one's own existence. The change sparked within Markovski's verses as a waving of the young Macedonian poetry is an endeavor for the lost and forgotten values, at the same time forming its own, timeless metaphysical mythology which is in collusion with the contradictions of the present time.About Stefan Markovski, critic Eftim Kletnikov comments that "he is one of the foremost names of the latest generation of Macedonian poets", author of "intellectual and curious nature, which requires synthesis between poetry and philosophy." And according to the choice of motives and the character of his creations, Stefan Markovski is a poet and philosopher, at the same time, or rather, a poet-philosopher who tries to bring in the intuition and logos in balance, to create the fabric of his verses from their refined and invisible thread, scooping from the deepest interior of the senses and consciousness, descending into the subconscious and climbing into the superconscious. In that sense, for Stefan Markovski, we can freely claim the relevancy of Heidegger's definition of poetry as a speech of the being. In that sense, can we define him as a kind of poetic pre-Socratic who tries to poetically interpret the being? Probably. He extracts his talent's hidden contents in a refined lyrical way and gives them a fertile imaginary flow. Markovski does not follow the main poetic structure of his generation, dominated by irony as the basic stylistic figure and worldview of reality. On the contrary, he is disposed to the dominantly lyrical associative type of poetry, truly inclining towards a recognizable symbolic type of expression, but not in a classic, crystallized poetic way.As a matter of fact, for example, as is the case with a symbolist such as Stefan Malarme, whose poetics of suggestion (things to be suggested, and not named) to which is close the poetics of Stefan Markovski - his poetic images are dimmed and dissolved in emotional and musical effects. Markovski's poetic paintings are deliberately put to be associatively loose, semantically dissolved in a general philosophical stream, which is basically Heraclitian, in which time flows away taking the moments and memories as a river - a symbol of the illusion of human life. On the other hand, according to Tocinovski, going ahead of his own time, Markovski's virtuosity is impressively circled in the poems where the predominant theme is the social function of the poet. The I-form as a writing nuance is not only a confirmation of creating his own autobiography, but also a tendency for his own autochthonous work with a personal attitude and values for the world and measure of the word and man, space and time." A pivotal theme is the man/subject as an energy and power in endurance and withstanding all the elevations and falls in the once-given human life. Tocinovski determines Markovski as "the current voice of modernity, but also a herald of the future".