Unchangeable

Petr Miloradović's poetic career so far is somewhat reminiscent of the biographies of famous American poets of the last century (Stevens, Olson), who, mostly spending their whole lives in one place - from the outside: in the province - turned those small towns into mythical places of the world. poetry and reminded that worldliness is primarily a matter of the spirit, and much less of geography. Somewhat aside from the noise and wild vanities, which, of course, also shape the professional part of our literary scene - which certainly does not include the artistically barren but status- and financially unsustainable circles of power between the Serbian motherland - the Ministry of Culture - signatures of support for Vučić, in the seven books so far, Miloradović has written one of the most beautiful, purest praises to the world and life in our contemporary poetry, with full awareness of the tragedy of human existence, without which, in fact, there is no great art. This awareness appears in Miloradović's work as sometimes hidden, sometimes more conspicuous melancholy, or (cultural) nostalgia, which have been woven into practically all the lyrical situations that the poet describes since the first book. This regret for the past, for something unnameable that has disappeared forever, regardless of whether it was experienced or imagined, a regret that in various forms marks world art at the turn of the centuries and that was "used" in our poetry (if it is important to say - relatively skillfully) by the so-called transsymbolist poets of the nineties, Miloradović not only inherited from them but, more importantly, recognized it as his most intimate feeling of the world.

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In the latest book Listening to the moose, however, the poet relegated this experience to the background, through the motifs of illness, transience, death(ness), more like a kind of general existential framework that is assigned to everyone, including his lyrical heroes. At the same time, on the stylistic-compositional level, the expression is more concentrated and metaphorical, the scenes are painted more capriciously, and all of this has resulted in a more reduced, but on the other hand, a more associatively rich, disjointed lyrical narrative. This is the case, for example, in the song "Ploče", in which the lyrical hero, the son, finds a double album of the Electric Studio of Radio Belgrade, which the mother brought as an "incomprehensible gift": "(...) Shares of silence and pulsation/ from the womb of a huge whale, the depths of the ocean;/ from an endless forest,/ where Hendrix composes/ and someone else is born and picks mushrooms (...)". The poem begins as a picture of family intimacy, and through cultural archeology, which is by no means an end in itself, but is the foundation of an authentic experience of music/art, it returns to the personal: "The old spiral paths/ sang a long song over and over again,/ every blink in that walk/ he explained Sinti:/ You are a son.” The poem is characteristic for raising awareness of the problem of the materiality of language, as in other poems its mediating nature is emphasized, and all this actually, on the edges of the text, represents a discreet homage to the post-avant-garde heritage.

In his main course, however, the poet remains faithful to his own obsessions: forgotten objects, the fates of the marginalized, walks in the forest in which there is always some barely visible movement, a sudden symbol, a stroke of fate, everything that shows us how the greatest and most unknowable is found in the smallest, most everyday. Thus, Miloradović, as in all previous books, continues to sing one thing, all the time he is actually talking about something else, bigger, more important, which surpasses us, and which concerns us much more than we can even guess, except in poetry and art.