Tatjana Gromača

The publication of her first collection of poems, Nešto nije u redu? (Something Wrong, Maybe?), started an avalanche of observations from literary critics and reviewers discussing new poetics, ‘reality’ in poetry and similar scholarly topics related to her work. There are strong and undoubtedly well-grounded reasons for this, since she entered the Croatian poetry with a very consistent, well developed and mature book of poetry, so consistent that it had almost no empty places.

The real novelty of her poetry lies not so much in its social dimension, present in her descriptions and lyrical dramaturgy in a convincing and plastic manner, as in the fact that the subject of her poems is a young girl, and identification with her is very easy. In other words, before Tatjana Gromača, Croatian poets did not write in this way, certainly not about the things she is writing about: the urban margin as the place where socially underprivileged people live, outcasts, deranged and dangerous persons. Gromača is able to establish a certain kind of contact with them, to verify their existence in a human way, without any ‘poetic’ forgery. So far, her poetry has moved mainly in this direction. Bibliography
Nešto nije u redu? (Something Wrong, Maybe?). Poems, Zagreb 2000.
Stimmt was nicht? Poems, German translation by Klaus Detlef Olaf, Ranitz Drucke, 2003. A Serbian expanded edition (2003) and a Slovenian edition (2004) have also been published.
Crnac. Novel, Zagreb, 2004.