Milica Špadijer
- Serbia -
Milica Špadijer (Belgrade, 1989): born two days after the fall of the Berlin Wall—and she lives her life accordingly.
Milica completed her undergraduate and master’s studies at the Department of Classics at the University of Belgrade and pursued doctoral studies at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, focusing on the reception of ancient literature in cinema.
She has published two poetry collections: Šar-planina and Novo groblje. Milica is the laureate of the prestigious Serbian poetry awards Lenkin prsten and Mladi Dis, and her collections have been shortlisted for several other literary prizes.
She has participated in numerous poetry and literary festivals in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and her poetry, prose, and translations have appeared in various regional literary journals.
She has translated from Greek the novel Cassandra and the Wolf by Margarita Karapanou, the poetry collection Aphrodite in Blue by Petros Stefaneas, a selection of poems titled This Place by Thomas Calapatis, and his play Barbed Wire, as well as works by Yannis Stigas, Thanos Gogos, and other contemporary Greek poets.
She is a member of the Association of Journalists of Serbia and hosts the radio show Klepsidra.
What draws readers to the poetry of Milica Špadijer is the simultaneous presence of childlike openness and a maturity born out of the impossibility of growing up—a maturity that seeks to suppress the fear of life itself. Her verses link space and time, the public and the private, the subjective and the objective, the cosmos and the earth she walks on and tries to navigate. These transitions between seemingly incompatible poetic landscapes, along with her use of diverse techniques, make her voice dynamically subtle and set her apart from most contemporary poets.
Despite the darkness and trauma that appear in parts of her poetry, Milica Špadijer evokes a space of hope. Critics often highlight how her poetic world skillfully balances violence and love, death and laughter, the everyday and the fantastical, with each element flowing into and complementing the next.
Her version of the so-called new reading of tradition, and her recontextualization of it, is undoubtedly one of the most authentic in contemporary Serbian poetry. She connects the unconnectable in an age where the unconnectable has already merged—on the streets and in our very lives—causing us to desperately seek escape routes, believing that perhaps poetry can help us survive.
"I am a terrible woman / Forever frightened / I have so little / Yet care too much / A woman whose fingers / Burn when she crosses herself"
—lines from Milica Špadijer’s poem Autobiography
(translated from the original Serbian)
—Dubravka Vrgoč, Express
Špadijer’s poetry strips away pathos and avoids diving into overly complicated, abstract, or unnecessarily intellectualistic verse.
Her work seeks to tame and understand fire and its many manifestations—fire as blaze, bombing, falling in love, death, warmth, life, “beauty and fury,” illness, and violence. Yet the lyrical subject dies:
“knowing that for me, paradise / is the place where fire is good” (Fire).
This place is not explicitly defined, but it suggests a true Paradise—the promised eternity, absolute love embodied in the image of the Orthodox God. In this sense, the collection can be read as a journey toward Resurrection.
Violence is merely a path to the good fire, to absolute peace, to a love that one believes in.
The poet “prayed [...] to survive the bear and the lead,” and she did
(Time, Forest).
Such optimism and fervor are rare in Serbian poetry since the time of the celebrated poet Branko Miljković.
Milica Špadijer’s second poetry collection, Novo groblje, represents a complex and coherent whole that questions the basic principles of modernity and the past, love and violence.
It is a unique biography of its time.
—Lazar Bukumirović, Letopis Matice Srpske
https://www.maticasrpska.org.rs/letopis_511_1/
Poetry
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Excuse Me, But I Really Can’t / ИЗВИНИ, СТВАРНО НЕ МОГУ
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Fire / ВАТРА
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Saint George / СВЕТИ ЂОРЂЕ
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Time / ВРЕМЕ
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Like Sylvia / КАО СИЛВИЈА
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Earthquake in Chile / ЗЕМЉОТРЕС У ЧИЛЕУ
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The Northern Tropic / СЕВЕРНИ ПОВРАТНИК
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Semi-Trucks Can Teach You A Lot, Girls / KАМИОНИ, ДЕВОЈКЕ
