Between 1970-4, in response to what seemed the dawning of a political and cultural thaw in Communist Albania, poet Moikom Zeqo began writing poems that pushed the limits of Albanian Socialist Realism. In Zeqo’s words, these poems aspired to a poetry where metaphors take off, where striking images emerge through terseness and elipticism, where identity becomes humanized, diverted from political vaudeville and poster-ism, where Albanian poetry rises to join the poetry and art of Europe. After publishing a few cycles of these poems in periodicals, however, Zeqo was officially upbraided for producing work deemed hermetic,
modern,
dangerous and foreign, and the full, unpublished collection, entitled Meduza (Medusa), was suppressed.