Marija Živić is eighteen years old. She is a high school student. Marija is also a poet. This is her first collection. „I know who you are“, is the message that the titles sends to us. It is not easy to say, to reveal, who she is. Background and future profession-computers. That is one Marija. The other one, the one more difficult to reveal– is misterious, restless, curious, thoughtful. That Marija feels she is a poet. Here are her thirty poems, wnough for her to step into the world of poetry. They are love poets, I think there are no other poems, only variations.
Marija feels that she is strange, and with her, that is a search for a complete realization. She guesses that it is only possible through love, which is neither light, nor reliable. She therefore says:
„I stare at the face of death life joy
I know those feelings better than anyone“
She depicts a lot of feelings, a lot of tears, al lot of waiting:
„On the cross of life
Crucified by hope“
(Born within a scar)
I ask myself, weather some word of feelings is overexaggerates in her poems. I then answer, if it were not for that, would she write poems at all? In the poem ’’Perhaps’’ she herself sxpresses doubt:
’“Perhaps I’m not a poet
That words and verses strings
But there is something
For you
That this poem brings“
There is no vanity, there are no self appraisals, she ’’jolts and suffers as Nature in a storm’’. She doesn’t like nirvana, she does not free her spiit in the material world, her age is not cut out for that. She cuts air, she breaks the ’’silence’’. ’’ Love has trapped my body’’, she says in a song. She likes that captivity, and although she will cry a sea of tears, although everything will be „a snowball“. She follows her trails well, she can depict her states, she is suspicious, pathos is even present at times.
In the poem ’’I Know Who You Are’’, she says:
„You love to love
You hate to hate“
That second person she is addressing is herself. Are we not what we tell others. If in these times the language of love dies, there will be no feelings to depict. Marija both has feelings and words to express them. That does not mean there are no better ones out there, more refined ones, more picturesque, but years are ahead of her and she will find them. Her way is closer to coloquial, the poems seem original, thy are clear and close.
There is no cosmetics, no atism. In the poem ’’You Are Nowhere to be Found’’ she ’’Calls from her throat, calls from her heart’’. As a ’’frightened bird’’, she ’’seeks her seed’’. Marija sees the seed in poetry, she looses it and finds it, and persistantly keeps seeking it from her flight. I wish her success.
Ljubica Zlatović
