PP Release News: First Collection Published in 2014

Release News

a new poetry collection by Risto Lazarov has just been released by Poetry Pacific today! here is the link to view/buy:: 

http://www.lulu.com/shop/risto-lazarov/a-seashell-anchored-in-the-centuries/paperback/product-21402829.html.

THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO, INTEREST IN, AND SUPPORT OF THE POET!! 

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The newest poetry book by Risto Lazarov, full of fresh imagery and intriguing insight.

Product Details

Product Details

ISBN

9781304805973

Copyright

Risto Lazarov (Standard Copyright License)

Edition

First Edition

Publisher

Poetry Pacific

Published

January 16, 2014

Language

English

Pages

103

Binding

Perfect-bound Paperback

Interior Ink

Black & white

Weight

0.45 lbs.

Dimensions (inches)

6 wide x 9 tall

The poetry book  Smallstepper by Risto Lazarov is the living proof that the freshness of the poetry word can be preserved in poetry book that has been written decades after the first one.  This newest poetry book written by Lazarov is his twenty first, published forty years after his first “Night bird in the park”. With this Smallstepper he is drawing his own poetic geography, from Skopje to Prague, from Belgrade to Terezin, from Istanbul to Berlin, from the Andes to Altai, from Japan to home. And within this poetic map of the world the quest for the soul-mates is occurring, people known and unknown, from the ones which he will meet on purpose or accidentally, to those with which the meeting is only imaginary. My favorite poem from Smallstepper is “Daisy: a girl with gondolas in her eyes/look”, but here as a reference for the future readers I will quote a verse from another poem from the book named “Brecht on the beginning of the 21^st century”: On the small graveyard in Berlin/ on the beginning of the twenty first century/ the reality smells biter/ like formalin leaked/ from the old jars of history/ which does not stop to repeat itself.

-Goce Smilevski, Winner of the European Prize for Literature 2011.

The last poetry book by Risto Lazarov is “freshly bathed/perfumed/and prepared/ … angelic beauty” which one can meet through one of the streets of Skopje, and as “real smallstepper/ she knows that as smaller steps it makes/ as farther it will gets”, and we (the book and me) have really met changing a few cities: Skopje – Leipzig- Ljubljana- Graz- Ljubljana.  In this book there are as many anthological poems as there are not so many in the real anthologies. It is nicely (but not carefree and with no danger) one to go deep in the truths, known to us from our everyday life, that are exposed by Lazarov in a poetic manner: “Flared, than sweaty rock – that’s history”, he says, and this acclamation hurts and heals at the same time, same as the  welfare of the reverses, or of the Andes which have always been higher than life itself, or the reality that smells bitter like formalin on the small graveyard in Berlin, or the Macedonian  fires on Kolede (the fires that are burned before Christmas ) like non-conscious of the newly-composed   roisterers, or the ballade for the return from Japan… Singing and thinking are perfectly inwrought together, synthesis of the time in which we are all contemporary to each other. This is a book to be read in a train, plain or on the footway; poetry not for the soul but for the heart, for the mind and for the soul.

-Lidija Dimkovska, Winner of the European Prize for Literature, 2013

His poetry is characterized by a lively and life-giving poetic memory. It reawakens the great enigmas of spirit in which we recognize human suffering and longing. There is in his poems a certain dialectic, a Heraclitic tension which reveals that every truth has its own opposite, i.e. that suffering gives rise to hope, that everything in this world and this century is as it is in Borges's well-known Book of  Sand.  There is not a poem by this poet which is not in its own way also cryptoethical. (Georgi Stardelov)

Risto Lazarov’s poetry leaves an impression of readability, which is referential, colloquial and communicative. It is a fine example illustrating the fact that poetry does not have to be strictly hermetic, radically ambiguous and difficult of access, as is sometimes thought. It is that principle of relaxed narration, combined with the principle of internal poetic rhythm, freedom in playing with words, jesting with petrified clichés and idioms, a poetics of impertinent pointing out, a rhetoric of apparently childlike speech, a tension between the reader and the poem and the conventional notions of lyrical forms, that give Lazarov’s poems their essential poetic charm. (Katica Kulavkova)

Risto Lazarov’s poetry has never lagged behind the development of global poetic thought. Lazarov is a modern and postmodern poet, and today it could be argued that he is primarily an urban poet in search of man "lost" amidst the urban jungle, symbolically as well as literally, in the midst of a void brimming with paradoxes, alienation, superpowers and small nations, the crucial events and everyday politics which push the life of the common man to the borders of despair and a "hideous giggle." The poetry of Risto Lazarov is a poetry about us and our time, now, always and forever. (Lidija Dimkovska)

We can freely say that Risto Lazarov’s poetry is written in accord with Rilke’s poetic theory as revealed in the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: “Verses are not, as people think, feelings… they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals…” The poet patiently collects impressions and sensations, and putting them into order turns them into art. His expression is full, the lines are united into a vivid picture, and the language is perfectly simple, striking and symbolic. (M. Bojanic)

Risto Lazarov’s poems arise from his own lived experience. They are an explicit response to the sensations of reality, to the temptations of memories and privileged figures of one life experience. The poem is born simply because it must be, it is the fruit of a challenge shaped by reality and now requires as terrible and energetic a response as possible. In the place where events and oblivion clash, the poem begins. (Gojko Bozovic)