Leaving Memory is a book about lost love, about time elapsed, about moments and shortcomings that take root in a person, grow and change his or her worldview, about the liberation of a person from his or her previous forms, past entities.
Vangel Imreorov's poetic debut can be read through the mirror as a key image, as a metaphor. In front of the mirror is the memory of the beloved woman, confronting the uneven shadows of the past, the reflections of the experience. Reflections and shadows are symbolic expressions of moments seated in the mind as at home. They are transmitted to thoughts, saturate them and reveal the presence and absence, the folds on the glass, the signs on the fragile surface.
"Only in the mirror
i still see her
how I straighten my hair,
tell me something nervous,
fast.
i am approaching,
I sweat it with my breath,
run my hand over the glass,
I slowly push it away
and again she is gone.
every time
little bit more
from before."
The book opens with a personal dedication. Not only does initiation reappear in a particular poem, but it resonates constantly and multilaterally in poetic situations. The following verse is written by P. Neruda: "Love is short, forgetting is long." The quote extends the ideological beginning at the title of the poem, proclaims the direction of the process of distinction from memory.
Leaving Memory consists of three cycles that divide the book into meaningful slots into separate stages: "1 - what you are chasing is just the shadow of something else", "2 - approaching", "3 - conversation between seasons ". The independence of the cycles is conditional. The transitions are smooth. The stages derived from the headlines in the verses are a mirror, inverted version of the separation from the burden of the past: pursuit, approach, meeting. The collision of the name of the book with the names of its parts actually retells the emotional-semantic course and the ongoing between and in the works of the separation between entering into the painful, in the remaining signs and their subordination, overcoming, overcoming.
Already in the first poem it resizes, refracts the past. The man leaves and leaves behind the calendar. The calendar will be pulled down from the wall and a round clock will appear in the empty square. The memory will be reconsidered, it will be erased. Arranged dates will be replaced by small mirror pieces. Gradually the mirror rolls over. The world is beginning to look at man.
"The street measures you
with a look, he watches you through your windows,
puddles count your steps "
The world and man are watching each other through the windows, across the apparent frontiers in the first cycle. The window is an image through which the perceptions are triggered, the movements in the memory are provoked. Behind the semblance of viewing is the personality in an attempt to learn the external, to absorb it, and through the mastered to realize its own place in being.
"The past is coming back to you
1.
you are traveling
you look out the window.
birds in the sky
hang on threads of light,
in the distance clouds
are coming
the day is slowly changing
with another day. "
Then the shadow of the woman goes home, and the shadow of the man fills the room. Slowly his body "stops being a body." The transformation that occurs when not the event but the perspective of it changes affects the senses, thoughts, feelings, even the "once tired sigh", which is "now a breath of breath".
Vangelel Imreorov's poetry pulsates between meaningful upheavals, between slowing and hurrying, between calm gaze and restless touch. It strives for reconciliation with oneself and with the world, despite continuous adaptations, metamorphoses, but also because of the intensity of emotions, because of the lessons learned from the past.
While the first cycle ends with a restless sleep state, with silence, the second cycle begins with breaking and accepting the unspoken. The world is no longer viewed from a distance, through a language-marked barrier. Man is an organic part of his surroundings. The perspective of the mirror is different, as a result of the movement, from the ideas in the first cycle.
And "people keep flowing", pouring into the rain "like cloudy waters" - "on the crushed map of the city". The city is presented doubly in terms of meaning - as two structures interacting, as a sense of place and as an image that can continue to shrink until it becomes an idea, until it is lost, subsides.
The eyes are closed and the shadows of silence between him and her disappear. In "Leaving the Memory" the disappearance is traced to its full disclosure, without unnecessary drama, to the perception of the lack as being, as a condition and attitude.
"We are both absent
by yourself
and from the world,
but there are no shortages between us "
The approach, which has given its name to the cycle, is touching the woman, to the reflection that the man remembers, to the body that leaves traces. Traces are details of memories that are relayed to be stripped naked, to be completed, removed.
In the book, the distancing from memory goes along with the accumulation of dreams and shadows, of illusions as it goes through the foreseeable, through the days, in February and April. Long forgetting, the attainment of personal truth, does not respect the linearity of time. In the poem Year, for example, time is love, it is subject to the idea of a woman, the desire to stop the present at the chosen point with: “We stay there.” But the months are relentless in our turn and “we are no longer together”. It is "waiting for the past to do its best." He is trying to create an "independent life". The man, torn between the void, the idyllic fullness of time, the idyllic fullness and the desolate space of the present, leaps "from memory to memory", turns into a walking shadow, dreams the woman, learns to "calmly" pass "herself" while the beloved lives behind his eyes. When he tries to imagine, to revive the past, he sees his detachment from it and begins to see the unordered, spread, backwardness in the world. The rain that fell when they were united begins to "reverse". The verses of the second cycle repeat the idea of change, of breakup, of separation with the beloved, of leaving the person and himself, of the life he led, of the hopes he kept. Attempts to escape from the pain, to suppress it, are exacerbated and: "I go inside without wanting to be there." Lyrical tensions, heightened emotionality, without being excessive, excessive, the suggestion is neutralized by the request for an end, with the short "come on". After the set finale, the man looks through her, her voice dies. He is back in himself.
In the third part of the book "in the mirror" appears the family, relatives, strangers. The conversation here is between seasons, between generations, between man and his contemporaries, between memories. The past is now beyond, beyond the window, behind the window, and is viewed as the city in the first cycle. Having passed on the form of man, as a reflection that has become detached from the personality, it no longer appears in the mirror. It's quiet. Silence doesn't hurt, it doesn't divide. Loneliness is silent. Absenteeism is absorbed by the "whole body". And "flowing time is addictive" with its drawbacks. The questions no longer weigh and can be asked.
"Why are you hungry for light,
as soon as you find the outline of your life
only in the dark? "
The thirst for light leads to a new time and place. Emotions are captured in lighter shades. The view (the mirror of the person) is again different, again because of the previous verses. The book ends with a "premonition" of meeting and love, of a new beginning, but also of the feeling that "you are adding days" and "you are making a life" in order to leave the limits of memory. Outlined above is only the eternal renewal of man. And again the woman "teaches" you, and again you wish, you want to "touch" "beautiful things".
The three cycles create a lyrical story, precisely indicated by the title of the book. It is plotted through smooth transitions, through repeated images and leitmotifs, through mirror transitions, which are manifested in both the individual poem and the cycles and at the level of the poem. In V. Imreorov's debut, the present calls for the shortcomings, looks into the memories, expresses them. Words form the past. The past is sheltered in man and once lived, emotionally received and worn, remains to be detached and released from consciousness. Liberation is portrayed as a long process of re-creation, of a new creation of man by himself.
The topics and issues covered cover not only love but also the transitions that occur in human life, the gaps, the traces of the past, the brevity of hitherto with the woman, with the people, loneliness and alienation, the detachment of the person from her previous silhouettes and faces, self-knowledge and rediscovery.
With ideas, with language and style, with its impact, Leaving Memory is a poetry book that makes you expect a worthy sequel.
