Wandering Scents

Since ancient times people have linked scents with the soul, for they too are present yet elusive, like the presence and mystery of the soul. The human soul, tender and sensitive like scents, has always believed that they confirm the presence of some friend who strengthens its hope that it is not alone on the paths of life. That is why Vera Basor named her collection “Wandering Scents,” intimating that her poems are notes and messages from that search for the beings who hold her hope. She first confronted God, angrily reproaching Him for not protecting her from pain and suffering, and then she glimpsed, across the spaces of her soul, a figure from her dreams who might be a faithful companion on the paths of life. Suffering is, perhaps, a human purification, a cleansing of souls from the sediment of evil and hatred, and that by God’s will. She experienced painfully the destruction of Serbia and the suffering of her people, to which her poems bear witness: Hordes of Evil, The Born, and Serbia. Yet she was never satisfied with the exits she found from life’s painful whirlwinds. In the collection’s final poem, “I Die Slowly,” she called out to the one whose love summoned her, leaving him a vow. In this way she affirmed that the only beauty of life is love for the being that one’s own soul seeks and creates. The poems of Vera Basor are her footsteps across the empty fields of hope, as she sought what should be revealed, “why everything is cursed.” Whether it can be found, Vera Basor did not confirm. Or perhaps she hid it in the ambiguities of her poetic speech, so as to preserve poetry as the hope of love.