When in one of the opening poems, "returning home", the lyrical hero of Srđan Gagić says: "(...) with age, the fear of the house that will unfold/ like a flower, let the hands of others pick us,/ encompass us, plunge into the geometry of life (...)", then it is clear - and the title itself points to this, after all - that the poet is still moving in the circle of his obsessive themes - family, home, homeland - that is, more precisely, that he is facing anew with complex and essentially ambivalent feelings, perceptions and experiences that the neighbors, the original space and time produce in it. And is it even possible to approach this topic without such a divided feeling: between a perfectly happy childhood, which, of course, no one has ever lived, but whose even appearance denies us the experience of the harshness of the world and prevents us from growing up, and, on the other hand, a difficult and unhappy one, which no one wants, because it later deprives us of the comfort of the past? Isn't reaching the point of life maturity in The deceptive history of home, precisely therefore, overcoming this emotional duality? Now there is no more fear, nor that hidden anxiety when talking about these topics that marked Gagić's first book in particular. Children in the window (2015), and partly another Transitional era (2017), but it seems that there is no consolation: the refuge offered by the first home is suddenly no longer enough.
And yet, the resolution of this complex is not announced easily or simply, because each departure from each house is compared to that first departure from the first home: "it begins without any indication: departure, packing in boxes/ vague traces of what, useless legacies./ we leave the last watering of newly sprouted plants to others.// from here we have to move on, without open possibilities,/ without longing for rooms into which the deceptive comfort of the kitchen penetrates./ without open doors for the return, under the mother's eyelid,/ under the father's arm that rejoices at the currants,/ until the end of the summer/ war with the blackbirds/ over the power of the round fruit.// under the hand the history of the house/ and the tribe from which the unbearable pain came/ like a chronic ear infection The deceptive history of home and they can, directly or indirectly, be linked to home and homeland. The lyrical hero does not talk here about the reasons for leaving - something happened and now he has to look for a new place of residence - nor is it about one move: when several addresses change, all moves become similar. But similar does not mean the same, and hence this poem, although it offers the appearance of a circle, of constant departure and return, actually implies a spiral movement: both the house and the one who leaves and returns are at least a little different in each subsequent encounter; as if, paradoxically, they are closer to each other, if only for a little bit, even though - both in this poem and on the level of the book as a whole, from poem to poem - they are moving away from each other all the time.
The whole book is actually structured according to a similar pattern: poems about travels and those whose theme is home follow one another, while in the first, in some suddenly awakened memory, home emerges in some image ("(...) and somewhere smells of a general place:/ homeland in Chinese sneakers,/ the smell of our peninsula that emerges through the armpit,/ through the crotch wherever you arrive like a pestilential halo under which/ the moon of recognition sets(...)" or "(...) the gap between the front teeth of the waitress reminded you/ of childhood, of the darkness under your mother's skirt"), and for others unknown distances and the thought of leaving ("it's simple, when I think of home I think of distances/ that are immeasurable with the eye(...)"). But this alternation, which is like a constant, spiraling circle around an unchangeable center, always implies small deviations: each subsequent poem about home offers a different image of that basic space; mother and father are closer and more impressive after each song, and at the same time, in each song it is as if we are meeting them for the first time; every departure, excursion or journey starts from the same point, although it contains all the previous journeys.
The said structure can sometimes be seen on the level of individual poems: smaller units in poems, most often stanzas, represent wide, dense, but also dynamic poetic images, or better - frames, which end with some kind of rounding off of what was said, sometimes with a more or less universal statement, but always arising from this specific lyrical situation. The next unit/stanza, however, seems to start from the same place, often with the same motif or words ("there were days when I (...)// there was a deaf place where I sit" or "home is a knife (...)// home is an act (...)" or "one poem (...)// one verse (...)// one poem (...)"), or with the next stop on the way, in memory or train of thought. All this actually on the metaphysical level suggests a feeling of powerlessness and the impossibility of leaving, it speaks of the "tough roots" by which we are tied to home and family, no matter how daring we are, no matter how much we follow the epochal imperatives of mobility.
This poetic-metaphysical principle is also implemented on the thematic-structural level of the book. Although, namely, The deceptive history of the home it is not divided into cycles, it has an opening poem which, as has been said, announces all the departures and returns that will follow, and the last one, which sums up what happened and puts a temporary stop to all these wanderings, while thematic circles alternate between them: poems about returning home and homeland ("homecoming", "bread" and "kitchen"), then a circle about travel experiences ("general places", "origin" and "crack"), then related ones, and again various songs about encounters with nature, rural areas, the sea, on trips, vacations, literary gatherings/festivals, and then a whole circle of songs from Yugoslavian, post-war areas, in which autopoetic poems ("word", "song" and "one song") are inserted, and then a whole that includes the songs "home, blue cycle", "home, linocut" and "home, the art of construction", in which home is felt, contemplated from the side, as if from a distance, in order to through the poem "alternative history of the home or Fr the small death of a horseman", as a kind of intersection of thematic groups, there was a circle about children's fears ("morning, 1992" and "green green grass of home") and mourning for youth ("young" and "migration"), after which comes the most comprehensive and psychologically complex cycle about father and mother, family, friends, relatives in general, which, with occasional deviations, extends practically to the end of the book. It is interesting that the penultimate poem, "over borders", the poet quotes from the previous book Transitional era, with one added verse. It has a motto from the song "Ugar" by Goran Čolakhodžić, from the book In the end, that garden (2015) - by the way, one of the most notable debuts of the Gagić generation - and which has a motto from Project Poland Ivan Šamije, which establishes a poetic-transgenerational regional connection, or rather a frame, expands the coordinate system within which one should read and The deceptive history of home. This is important especially since Gagić's book is stingy in terms of referentiality, and the silent work of reading can only be recognized deep in the background, on further levels of the text.
Therefore, despite the fact that the book is made of one piece, the poet did not completely abolish the division into cycles, but it is no longer so blocky: thematic units flow into each other in permeable lyrical interstices, with related motifs and experiences of the world. In this way, the topics became more mobile, harder to grasp, and the picture of the world more vague. At the same time, the motifs of home, house, father, mother, travel places, which form the backbone of the book and appear in different incarnations, with different emotional-psychological intensities, from joyful to melancholic, and even fatalistic - in the context of Gagić's three previous books impose an impression of incompleteness and openness.
This actually leads to a new theme of this book, although it may seem that it has been there since Gagić's first poem - the great theme of transience and regret for youth. One of the songs in the anthology, "young", talks about her: "it seems to me - or it just seems to me -/ that I was never, or at least not long enough,/ really young. one thing is certain: I was a boy// and after that everything was more or less forced growing up/ to become this. between the days there had to be some/ hunger and unattainable abundance, lack of sleep./ you had to buckle your knees,/ or at least strongly and deeply feel what they were books/ were written about youth. they had to be read in order for their own/ to remain unwritten. it had to be so difficult and so desirable/ to be young./ and yet: it seems to me (or it only seems so to me), that I have always swallowed pieces of life that would have fed my youth and made it sluggish and sleepy/ sleepy and unrepentant, until the first morning dawned." You should pay attention to the beginning of the first and third stanzas, in which "or it just seems so" in the first verse first appears separately, emphasized, as a question, only to be withdrawn in parentheses in the third stanza, testifying to reconciliation and immutability. The difference is small at first glance, but crucial for the meaning and meaning of the song, because it shows the effects of time, in those small, elusive shifts. Towards the end of the book, the poet returns to this theme in the poem "about youth, about youth", in which the title motif takes on an abstract-anthropomorphized form, which makes the departure and awareness of transience more pronounced, and the effect of time becomes more visible.
These poems, of course, gain their full meaning in the context of the book, because it is about an authentic lyrical hero, who comes to the realization of the passing of youth after his unique experience, after the forest, fear, war, growing up, leaving home, constant moves, poetry. Time, therefore, like the sky, has no favourites, and Gagić shows, in a series of anthology poems, in the most convincing poetry book of the current year, that the real struggle begins only with this realization.
