he Sign and Its Children (Znak i njegova deca, 2000) is a collection of poetry by the Serbian-American poet Dejan Stojanovi¿ (1959). The book contains 43 poems in five sequences: "The Supreme Sign," "The Sign and Nothing," "Sign Face," "A Word and a Sign," and "The Sign and the Dream." The search for more compact and essential relations between the poetic statement and the image (symbol) conditions new qualitative and creative accents in Dejan Stojanovi¿'s writing compared to his previous poetic work. Loyalty to subtle linguistic essences, "linguistics," and the hermeticity of meaning place Stojanovi¿ in a small and autochthonous circle of poets representing Serbian poetry's basic creative and artistic strength in the last few decades. The poet's esoteric curiosity questions the formative causes of the world-the Sign and the Lightray, the first destroyers and builders, the primary metaphors of existence, which multiply in the interrelationships of analogy and denial of the eternal truths of existence and duration against the transience of earthly days. Symbolic, transparent, metaphysical, and magical form concentric circles of meaning that achieve their unique elementarization about basic human aspirations; towards the heavenly and divine essence or the intoxicating depths of the abyss of absolute oblivion. - Petar V. Arbutina.