From the Atelier

Published: 2015

The title of the new poetry book by Sanja Lovrenčić offers the reader the leitmotiv of a specific homogeneous world. The parallelism with the universe of visual arts is accentuated by the fact that many poems have typical specialized terms as titles - landscapes and portraits, nudes and marinas, interiors and diptychs. Art terminology serves here as a kind of mask or "persona" of the author, as visual correlative of things foreboded. It is not a...

Night-Time

Published: 2010.

In her sixth book of poems Sanja Lovrenčić is not giving up the surreal, dreamlike tissues of her poetic abode. Depths, skies, water – and a circle (or the island as its embodiment in the material world) are basic strongholds and thematic blood vessels of her pungent and dark lyrical vision. In this fantastic, but ominous journey with changing dimensions and companions, in this succession of "arrival and departure ceremonies," where "the world becomes a black...

River Certainly Does Love the Flood

Published: 2006.

Kiklop Award for the best poetry book, 2007

about the book:
Sead Begović: Walking with Pebbles in your Shoes (fragment)

"In her first poems Sanja Lovrenčić distanced herself – in an elitist manner – from the descriptiveness of reality and certain of its themes, now she relaxedly approaches them with elements of fairy tales – dreaminess, linnen-ness and cotton-ness. Suddenly, for her, everything is utterable without the...

In the Free Quarter

Published: 2002

two poems from the book, translated by author

Self-portrait in flame

I've got bird-bones
hidden in this imperfect body
a skeleton incessantly trying to fly

I’ve got a bird- voice
cramped in this imperfect language
a voice incessantly trying to break through
become twitter and warble
the croak
the shriek
that pulls the day out of the woodland soil

I’ve...

Instructions for a Rambler in the Garden with Choirs

Published: 2002.

„Instructions for a Rambler in the Garden with Choirs“ are composed of eight very rounded cycles of poems. Long-breath lyrics evoke some experienced situations ("Grande Arche de la Defense" reads as the journal-letter-travelogue), and at the same time, by combining, varying and accumulating subtle images, their author constructs an autonomous space. Dedication to the memory of the poet Hrvoje Pejaković witnesses about a choice of a subtle interlocutor, a kind of...

Scarlet Tissues

Published: 1994.

fragment from the book, translated by Ognjen Smiljanic

Ich Form

I.

above the coast, above the porch, waiting,
  not touching the rough benches,
    not touching the fabric hiding the rocks. . .
compresses, compresses should be placed on the milk glands
  of the night sky!
instead of festive high chairs the guests stand
  around the table while in the...

Insula dulcamara

Published: 1987.