4 days ago
A poetic odyssey through time, memory, and mysticism
Dr. Maja Herman Sekulić [Serbia/USA] is a towering literary figure whose work excels in poetic grandeur, aesthetic beauty, prophetic insight, and global reach. A Princeton Ph.D. in World Literature and double Fulbright Fellow, she is a Nobel-nominated poet, novelist, essayist, bilingual scholar, and major translator. Author of 30 books in Serbian, English, German, and French, her poems have been translated into 25 languages. She also serves as Vice-President of the International Academy of Ethics.
'Grand Plan', by Maja Herman Sekulić, [translated by Claudia Piccinno with a foreword by Dante Maffia], is a world poem. In this monumental collection, Sekulić creates an interior atlas stretching from Belgrade to Rome, from Princeton to Myanmar, suspended between ancient civilizations and modern pandemics. 'Love is the only project,' declares one of the key verses, and around this axis rotate family memories, historical traumas, and mystical revelations.
Style: Clear yet richly layered.
Each poem is a small vessel navigating time and consciousness. Sekulić shifts between lyrical and civic, autobiographical and mythological modes with natural ease. Her imagery is potent—the Super Moon observing war, jade dispelling nocturnal ghosts, the archaic Mother of Vinča carving the word Love.
Recurring Themes:
• Loss of identity: Fragmented genealogies, vanished nations, disappearing homes.
• Ancestral feminine strength: From the mother-father fusion in 'Daughter of Sisyphus' to the 'Madonna di Vinča', sacred and generative.
• Mysticism and Nature: The Danube as mother-river, rain as epiphany, the jungle as a cosmic womb.
• Memory and survival: Amid dictatorships, wars, and pandemics, the word endures— 'When the world collapses... pick up the pieces.'
A Total Work:
This collection bridges poetry and history, spirituality and politics, East and West. It sings and affects, caresses and screams. Sekulić's voice is, as Maffia notes, 'an expressive force that can give life to memories and make even the personal become universal.'
Tesla and I: Poetry and the Electricity of the Soul
Living within walls once occupied by Nikola Tesla in New York, Maja dances between past and present, matter and metaphysics, showing how poetry generates energy.
Open-hearted Analysis:
'On the top of the world I / in the poet's tower / up there / in the grey sky / let my thoughts come out / singing in a full voice'
These lines reflect an alchemy of solitude and elevation. Maja seeks to inhabit Tesla's mind—not to narrate it—but to feel and transmit its rhythm in verse:
'We live in his world / as he lives in my poetry.'
A Perfect Closing:
This is total symbiosis. We live surrounded by the world Tesla imagined; he lives eternally in Maja's poetry. 'Grand Plan' is a hymn to memory as a form of eternity—placing Maja Herman Sekulić alongside Leonard Cohen, Pasternak, and Patti Smith.
(Mauro Montacchiesi one of the leading Italian intellectuals, multi-talented and multi awarded author, ex-President of Art Academy of Rome)
