Bela
Goran Samardžić (b. 1961, Sarajevo), poet, prose writer, and co-owner of Buybook, published the collection Bela in 2020 – an intimate, elegiac, and lucid book dedicated to his mother Bela, who recently passed away.
The title "Bela" is not only the mother's name, but also a symbol of purity, loss, the color white (like pain, snow, death, emptiness). The collection is a lyrical diary of farewell: the poems are written in moments of great ruptures – the death of the mother, aging, existential crisis. Samardžić writes about his mother's illness, the last days, memories from childhood, Sarajevo in the 90s and the post-war period, writing her out "from the book of the living and writing her in the book of the dead".
The style is precise, without pathos – humor and defiance of aging (the boyish twin of fear) mix with sadness, irony and subtle tenderness. The poems are short, rhythmic, with a touch of black humor and existential lucidity – a farewell relieved of the dominant approach to showing "unusual strength" in pain.
Critics point out that this is one of Samardžić's most poignant and mature collections - a portrait of a mother, but also a self-portrait of a poet who faces death, transience and inheritance. The book was presented at Bookstan 2020, praised as the pinnacle of his lyricism - a quiet, deep and healing elegy for a mother and a lost world.
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