Jeton Kelmendi’s poetry consists of crystallized moments in which time has been suspended or transcended. His poetry is not a meandering through countless mundane stories, but rather it contains language refined into a concentration or meditation on lived experience captured in all its immediacy with all of its restlessness and uncertainty. However, Kelmendi is always delving deeper into the vastness of the unknown, searching for what is most meaningful. He is searching for a more profound understanding of the elusive self, the perplexing identity behind the mask. As he says: I saw time sliding from my hand and I was convinced that my absence does not exist so that I look everywhere to find myself According to Kelmendi, the poet’s intent should not be a wallowing in sadness and despair. Rather, he or she must struggle toward the light: “I tried to / exhaust the autumn or to dream the light / only to say a word.” Another example of this uplifting quality in Kelmendi’s voice can be found in the following conceit where he wants desperately to become the wind: If I were a northern wind I’d blow over valleys and peaks, tonight I’d bend oak trees and carry off hats I’d change this time into a different one. I’d break open the doors of hope and I’d be full of hope for a better time. Kelmendi is best able to find himself in his various interactions with others. Love, of course, is one path that he follows searching for the transformative powers that can only be generated from its de- lights and sufferings: “perhaps love can send me the new invitation / for awakening.” His love poems are a delight. Kelmendi portrays desire through a quest for language: “I meet you / in the pages of closed books / and the titles of forgotten poems.” What stunning lines! In fact, he describes his lover in terms of writing: “. . . you are / the bread of poetry / the water of the word.” In his most expansive description of love— patience, kindness, and understanding are the fundamental characteristics that evolve from his loving: We walk together through unknown streets, that only I see in my dreams that’s how I wait for you even when someone else waits for you it is still me doing the waiting Nevertheless, his descriptions of love focus on the emotion’s immediacy: “to me life is not life / if I do not love you every minut”; or “And then we climb together to the fire / there I am burning only for you.”; or “I and you dream each other”; or “For you, I always think nakedness.” Overall, his descriptions are sensual, but subtle, almost understated: “. . . distracted fingers / slipping through disheveled hair.” 6Likewise, Kelmendi finds himself through his family. His wife and his children help him establish the very context for his being, and his parents repre- sent the most cherished of his interconnections with life. For example, after the love poems, some of the most tender words in the book are reserved for his mother in the poem entitled “The Word Mother”: As much as I remember They taught me a lot of words then school and life but for me Mother remains the biggest word the sweetest and the most important. In a poem dedicated to his father entitled “Peja at Five in the Morning,” Kelmendi mourns the loss of his dad with these heartrending lines: Oh, Spring this gorgeous season always takes the meaning away from rhetoric, but this time it took my father, from now on we will live with more longing, with more memories, more stories everything will be multiplied only suggestions will be fewer because our father is not here anymore. Finally, there exists the larger society to which Kelmendi is dedicated and for which he served as a special forces command- er during the 1980s. Kelmendi’s poem “Love in the Time of War” describes the existential peril that the soldiers face daily on the battlefield: But in the end, this is war, and we don’t know the future Every day fighting with death these stories that someone or another fell for freedom or other news such as the enemy was destroyed— these are daily routines. Nevertheless, Kelmendi is able to preserve his humanity because he is able to love even during the most life-threatening moments of war: but even in the fiercest firefight a soldier will never stop thinking about love In a time of war God knows when the end might come perhaps neither time has space for love time has its toll but what if everyone would plant 8death who would be harvesting love? Only a dynamic poet who has been tested by death and suffering could return from the battlefield with news of love!

—Bill Wolak Bogota, New Jersey June, 2023