Skopje, 26 August 2023 (MIA) — The 62nd Struga Poetry Evenings festival hosted a book launch on Friday for its latest poetry anthology edited by Ivan Dzheparoski. Titled "Amid the Trees: Poetry and Flora," the anthology was conceived to promote "literary cultural ecology," "ecopoetics," and "botanical criticism," according to its editor.

"The fundamental ideas that formed my idea of compiling the anthology 'Amid the Trees: Poetry and Flora' have focused on promoting the idea of a literary cultural ecology and a literary ecology as key categories within a possible ecopoetry and the newly founded critical and theoretical approaches of ecocriticism, green (cultural) studies, environmental literary criticism and ecopoetics. Especially attractive to this plan was another approach that recently got its name: botanical criticism," Dzheparoski said.

The book contains 167 poems by Macedonian poets spanning the years from Slavko Janevski (1920-2000) to Iva Damjanovski (b. 1996), he noted.

The anthology was titled after a Blazhe Koneski poem. mr/