Welcome to Croatian poetry - March 2006

June 07, 2006 Stojević’s many books of poetry written in standard literary Croatian demonstrate a similar intention, combining, linking, interweaving and adapting poetic procedures, themes and motives drawn from the entirety of Mediterranean culture. In his poetry, the Mediterranean is the natural underpinning of a teeming, colourful world: a world that we know changes from moment to moment, just as we know that the best of it might already have been irretrievably lost. The Mediterranean as the source of cultures and civilisations ancient and modern, can be sensed in almost every one of Stojević’s poems, its sounds are fundamental to every one of his verses, where the chaotic and irresistible bustle of a port, innumerable contemporary, historical and imaginary figures, the notable and the nameless, exercise their right to an individual voice, their place under a remorseless Mediterranean sun.

Stojević’s poetry, then, is marked by countless shades of the colours and scents of the Mediterranean, and speaks of a literally breathtaking beauty as powerfully as it does of the ironic, coarse, rough and dangerous side of its life. He is guided by an identical poetic intuition when he makes use of motifs from early Croatian literature, ranging from the Renaissance to the late 19th Century. Stojević’s considerable learning is not an end in itself but a means which he handles in an remarkable and overwhelming manner, inventing new lyric images and circumstances in layer upon layer of language and culture, constantly and repeatedly demonstrating to us the vital, inexhaustible power of poetry itself.