Welcome to Croatian poetry - February 2005
In this issue we present two Croatian poets, Borben Vladović (1943), poet, playwright, novelist and short story writer, and Bojan Radašinović (1975), poet, essayist, former DJ, farmer and NGO activist.
The literary career of the first poet could be described as unusual in the context of modern Croatian poetry. After gaining his degree in social sciences, Vladović started to write neo-avantgarde poetry using the concrete and visual poetic techniques that interested many young Croatian poets during the 1970s and first half of the 1980s. His books, which to this day have preserved their freshness and ironic wit, won considerable critical attention and were anthologized in local and international anthologies. Later on, during the 1990s Vladović became more preoccupied with the poetical mainstream, and consequently started to write poems in free verse. Some of his best free verse poems, written with great skill and with many rhetorical devices, are presented here.
The other poet, Bojan Radašinović, became prominent when his first book of poetry, Sprega književnosti i prljavog rublja (Bond Of Literature With Dirty Laundry) was published and was awarded the Goran Prize For Young Poets in 2000. His poetry is characterized by the use of colloquial, unsophisticated language that cannot carry the weight of intricate figures of speech. Such a way of expression, which has emerged as a kind of fashion among the new generation of poets in Croatia, serves as a vehicle for bringing out a certain sensibility of the new individual. The hero or the narrator in his poems is always speaking in the first person, trying to grasp the immediacy of ordinary situations shared by his friends, acquaintances and his lover. Will he win or lose? That is beyond his power to know, it seems, and moreover it is beyond his interest and ambition. His attention is constantly close to the ground and from that standpoint he is able to come close to the turmoil of everydayness, and to describe it from within.
