I used to hate poetry. I claimed that poets are people who aren’t able to write massive creations, so they choose this way of expression in order to win the title of writers. Poems used to sound pathetic, pompous, or pretentious.
What changed my mind? Branko Miljkovic, Edgar Allan Poe, Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Johnny Shtulic, and many other characters that placed words like bullets in the magazine, sudden, simple and lethal.
When I first laid my eyes on Xhabir Deralla’s poems, they sounded somewhat familiar to me, as if I heard them in the past. They sounded truthful and real. Their reality is painful at moments, but essential, as well. Like a doctor who has to tell the diagnose to the patient, sentences line one after another, always personal – never general or neutral, sentences that carry the flag of truth in the revolution of mind.
(There you go, I become pretentious myself, when I write about poetry…)
The words of Xhabir Deralla are of the city, they walk the streets, ride in the elevators, eat junk food, get in cafés, jump over the bar, bounce from bottles and glasses, penetrate through the cigarette smoke, getting you drunk and sobering you up, intermittently.
Those are urban words, asphalted, red from the traffic lights and wide as the boulevards, greasy from the burek in the mornings, at times blurry as the smog, sometimes seductive as a mini skirt or a neckline.
Those are no easy words, impossible to swallow, they stay in your stomach like a brick, and are harmful to the liver, they are no good for vegetarians, anti-alcoholics, ecologists, and Buddhists. They are not recommended to animal and flowers lovers, no good for housewives or those who watch the state assembly’s channel.
Xhabir Deralla is not going to comfort you, it is not his aim. He doesn’t intend to warn you, it’s too late for that. Xhabir Deralla doesn’t aim at anything else but life the way it is. That is the task of the artist, indeed, to always be on the side of life and to witness it. A task that is never easy and thankful, but Xhabir wants (has to) accomplish it. As many before him, he is proud of the burden assigned to him (arts always demanded a certain dosage of masochism) and would not swop places with anyone.
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