Mateja Matevski is a central figure in the second generation of Macedonian poet-intellectuals who came to maturity with their nation in the 1950s and shaped the main directions of its contemporary literature. The founding generation of Macedonian poets who came before them--that of Blaze Koneski and Aco Sopov--had fought the battles for modernism beside their Serbian colleagues and against the danovite Realists of the early Socialist days. Now a second generation, university poets educated after the war, brought a new complexity, an informed literacy, and a heightened symbolic complexity to that literature. Poets such as Radovan Pavlovski shaped Macedonian natural imagery to new surrealistic power; Gane Todorovski and Vlada Urosevic brought contemporary and urban subjects into the poetry, but it would be Bogomil Gjuzel and especially Matevski who would bring that poetry to a new formal and referential awareness, a sense of form, and a consciousness in composition...