The accelerated landscapes in the poetry of Hristina Mircheva

Hristina Mircheva is an author with a strong individuality of themes and writing style. Without claiming to be exceptional, her poetry impresses at times with shockingly precise metaphors found in such places in everyday life that generally go unnoticed by the naked eye. But not for a poet like her. Proof of this is the collection of poems "Accelerated Landscapes", in which these amazing poetic discoveries, because for me certain phrases are really such, are highly concentrated and just "grab by the throat." I sit and think: - How is it possible for the human mind to give birth to such ingenious hits ?! But this is the power of poetry - to discover the unique in ordinary things and to see the world in a new way every day.

When he flips through the book, the reader immediately understands why the book is called "Accelerated Landscapes", even though the program poem is on the last page. Hristina Mircheva has managed to capture images and pictures of life and seal them on the sheet as a text, which, however, is more contemplated than read. Indeed, when one looks inside, one has the feeling that one is looking at many paintings from an exhibition, not poetic texts. Christina handles the images so well that the word, as the backbone of the whole construction, is lost, leaving only the essence, the spirit, the picture. But these pictures are not static, they are not finished - painted and forgotten - they are alive, moving, painted with the colors of the word, but acting, like a frame from a movie, which, however, does not reach its end.

A great example is what was said above in the poem "Long Day", which traces the movement of a human figure not only in space but also in time. An abandoned alley, obviously familiar to the heroine or author who writes, passes before our eyes in a funny cadence. "Wide sunny squares / lively squares with pictures of death sentences" and the presence of a man open up, which is also felt in his absence. It is felt through his personal belongings, carrying his essence and evoking thousands of memories - a scarf, a closed book, even the shadow around the corner, which is a presence, but still only in absentia. Time stretches and seems to become a single moment, where past, present and future are gathered. Because the meeting of the past seems equally near and far. Then "the thought loops around that moment with the embrace" and time completely stops, subsides in the memory, illuminated by the spotlight of consciousness. All that remains is the embrace "stuck like a boat in the shallows of memory. A moment of unprecedented merging. ”And this merging of time unites memory and present.

I observe the images and landscapes in Christina's poetry almost hypnotically. And each landscape hides many plots that remain undeveloped by the author, leaving a desire for a little more frame in the middle of nowhere, another moment of immersion in the paintings… Strongly affected in the book is the theme of sleep. At times, the idea of ​​whether the author is dreaming or actually experiencing what is happening is lost. She sometimes wakes up, sometimes falls asleep again and it is no longer known whether the landscapes come from the real world or the fantasy. And maybe it's a dream in a waking state, maybe a dream for a dream, a fantasy to live in the world of dreams.

I was extremely influenced by the poem "Ocher" and more precisely by the phrase: "the tree is a child that I take in a dream to the forest of people." I saw the lonely tree in the center of the city, surrounded on all sides by people and no other tree with which to exchange wind. This is how a man in the forest feels. This is how a tree left without others like it feels.

Another phrase is a real hit in the book and in Bulgarian poetry in general, because I have rarely come across such good metaphors:

Near the end, everything is more loving.
Even the houses, behind whose walls of whitewashed tombs smolder fates,
are only bright strokes in the landscape of the old master.