Radoslav Cichev has a history degree. He works as a presenter at Artifir and Alarm under the BNR's Hristo Botev program. He has authored two plays (The Collector and A Lifetime) and three books. She made her debut after winning an ARS Publishing Contest and as a result came out Dust of the Day (2011, ARS) - awarded in 2012 with South Pegasus Bronze. In 2012, Radoslav Cichev also won Sofia: Poetics. Three years after his second poem, "The Hunter's Heart is a Fox," (2013, Sonm.), The third, "5.6" (2016, Jeanette 45, ed.). "5.6 " e the aperture with which R. Chichev most often shoots 5.6. "XNUMX" is a title-metaphor, which allows the poems to be read as a series of photographs, as a tape from fragments of life when…
"eternity is your life
because what would she be
if you weren't there "
"5.6 "is about trying to recognize yourself in the people and realities that fill and make sense of your life. In the poem "5.6" - a kind of center (and namesake) of the book - for a moment the light illuminates the person next to you and you can already remember it forever, to preserve its image in the manifested negatives of memory.
"… Accordion-like memory
unfolds and shrinks, unfolds and shrinks… "
In the book, memory is themed and functions as an assembly space, as a volume of memories. Memory (like eternity) does not exist outside of man, but through it it is “shrunk” to an individual, personal archive. The initiations complement the unobtrusive personal, intimate nature of R. Chichev's third poem.
"we wake up caught hand in hand
everyone was walking around their promised land "
The memory is resized, shrinks to an instant, and again expands to scales beyond a specific time, beyond a specific person.
"… I walk slowly
between the shadows of trees and buildings
I watch things be born… "
In poems, the lyric self apparently only observes; it is located in the center of space - between the shadows of trees and buildings, between sky and earth, between surface and depth - between two forms immersed in rivers of light. The light divides the watersheds between the lyric self and the objects observed by it.
Light will captivate you if you choose the earth "in front of the bright sky." The light emanates from you too.
"it flashes our minds like a firefly
at a certain night at a certain place
and if you can get away
to look from the side
you will see how we shine
we warm the meadow
then it's not scary
it is bright."
If you look at yourself from another angle, you will feel your presence - the rays that flow from you - even though you "must be present", "not to be seen", and if you look for the person, he is in front of you - "missing". Absence is more palpable than presence, the more direct are the ways of remembering when you are living with absences. And in the empty place, "the light sits down." Light becomes interconnected, boundary, fills small "white distances", fills the space-time distance between poems. But "5.6" tells of both light and shade, the nuances, and the glare in which the details stand out, seemingly invisible in the big picture. The contrast in the picture depends on the condition. The state determines the extent to which "the degree is displaced" - determines the angle. The differences in perspective increase or weaken the dialogue between the poems. Intertextual dialogue allows poems that do not form cycles to form a whole.
If we accept that "5.6" is conceptually unified, we will notice how inside the book the natural pictures, meetings with homeless people or time with friends are arranged, how the world is arranged, how it is structured and systematized - from the gardens of Paradise, through the gardens of Sofia , to the dungeons. Tidiness is soothing. At the same time, "the tongue grows out of the garden," the forecast is "for rain and thunder," storms pass, and death "is dance."
"It's been two years since he died, and we've been dancing.
If you were here, you would be moving like a train,
hands rhythmically in tact to hurry up.
Without stopping - steam locomotive.
Your body between two stations in the cold to smoke… "
As the lyrical self views his memories as an album or as he walks while walking, he tries to peek into the hidden "behind all these faces", glances at the details in which he sees entire units of our existence, sees "your frozen eyelid" , by which "the world is slipping." "In the Garden of Eden, as well as in the dungeons, everywhere and at any time, we are the "seeds feeding the core" of the apple, we are in the interior, in a moment of the vast, when every moment, every touch is significant for shaping the landscape. If we continue the journey "inside the picture", we will probably think that „
"maybe this is not the way to go
maybe it's a line under your feet
crossing the road
and it's all a draft… "
And when we reach the end of the dungeons, we start to ask ourselves:
"when you are in the center of pain,
can you keep your balance? "
The question leaves room for choice between the tiled vertical staircase, the seeming serenity to read the world through, and the continuous movement inward, because "on the surface is easy". In the background, 5.6 asks: what is below the surface when our depths are drawn; are we not just an episode of the tape, are we not an incomplete projection of memory when memory pulses; why they are blurred visibly and essentially, actually and beyond. In poems that reach the end of the road, the end of the garden of life, you can "feel existence." There, the border is most clearly visible - with closed eyes.
From the title of the book to the last poem, the borderline, the way you look and what you see, the change of the viewing angle, the opening and closing of the eyes as a lens aperture, the gaze of the dust of the day (and / or eternity) they encourage you to accept that the distance between you and the objects, between you and the others, between you and the words, is reduced to a gap "through which light enters", "to enter darkness". Closer to everything that surrounds you - light and dark - you observe and assume that they "hold you to something fragile" "before the dead," before the rocks "shelter" you.
"the man looks like a delta
coming from the heights
a moment before it flows "
In the last poem, the movement stops, the path ends, the lyrical self takes refuge in the memory, flows into the light, because it knows that it does not need support to maintain balance when "instead of words" there is a spirit. Although the absence is accompanied by pain, although perhaps everything is just a draft, although the memory sometimes barely flashes, the light is never lost… When she's gone, "she's elsewhere."
