Showing all 10 results
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I’m Writing to You from a Faraway Land
Godina izdanja: 2023
Award for the collection of poems in prose "Tea Benčić Rimay" in 2021.
Shortlisted for the "Tin Ujević" Award 2023.
From the statement of the jury for "Tea Benčić Rimay" Award:
"The title phrase I'm writing to you from a faraway land is the fundamental and driving motif of the entire collection, which consists of 57 poems and an appendix at the end, entitled Instead of a prologue, which can be understood as a kind of key to reading and understanding of these poems on a semantic and formal level: But I-she still writes, draws hearts on the window panes (...) while from another small book someone repeats that what does not contain any emotion is simply not poetry – here, now, only the clouds have a clear shape.
'Beauty is an open letter of recommendation that wins hearts for us in advance'. This thought of Schopenhauer expresses the basic intention and need of the lyrical subject in this collection (the I-she) for communication. But who is the addressee? Who is the recipient of these letters? Someone known, close, dear, or just anyone who reads these poems? Every letter/poem is actually a story that the author wants to tell and which, she convinces the interlocutor, needs to be told, before the distance has become too great, before the stone wall we want to cling to has turned into prickly dry grass. (...) A report about unexpected changes that we have to get used to, about houses with ruined gables wrapped in black tarpaulins, to which their residents cannot return and no one offers an answer to the question – until when?
Such are the images which the poetess sends from a faraway land, a small land, a land of pebbles, a land of departures, a land of unreliable paths, from a white land... which remains white and therefore seems cold, unfulfilled. But that country is also full of challenges, as a space of creation, imagination and creativity – the ways of coping with insecurities and ambiguities in the world of slippery pavements from which it is easy to fall into the mainstream, into mediocrity, into general conformity… So it's a faraway country, but not completely unknown, right?"
(Božica Vuić)
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Sketch for a Heroine
Godina izdanja: 2021.
Longlisted for "Kamov" Award 2021 Shortlisted for "Ivan Goran Kovačić" Award 2022 As a poet of proven skills, Sanja Lovrenčić sketches a mysterious heroine. Who is she? After reading, it is up to us to conclude. Or to let her continue to take shape within us for a long time. For, this collection of poems counts on the cooperation of a careful watcher and listener, a curious reader sensitive to language and its beyond. Sanja Lovrenčić invites us on an adventurous poetic journey through the poems/episodes of a very special, never fully expressible or sharply drawn protagonist, with whose joys, doubts, insights and resignations we easily empathize. (Dorta Jagić, ed.)
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Flight Trajectory
Godina izdanja: 2018.
Flight Trajectory brings a selection from the author's poetic texts created between 2016 and 2018. It is divided in six parts - "Solstice Song", "New Language", "State of Crowding", "Multiple", "Winter Solstice" and "Volcano Land" - discreetly marked by the annual orbit of the Sun. They are written in free verse, and the last cycle could be characterized as a series of prose poems. Open-ended and often experimental, they are a kind of the author's search for a "new language".
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From the Artist’s Studio
Godina izdanja: 2015.
The collection From the Artist’s Studio contains about eighty poems written over several years, grouped in different cycles. "Notes from the Studio" are short texts of pronounced visual references, poems from the "Scrabble" cycle are based on an aleatory play on words, eight poems called "Animalia" connect animal motifs, while the common denominator of "Counting Poems" is the rhythm of long verses connected in blocks; "Scrabble", as well as the poem "Deep Black" that ends the collection, were originally created as parts of two art installations that the author realized in collaboration with the visual artist Saša Martinović Kunović. The title of the new collection of poems is more than eloquent and offers the leitmotif of a distinct space, a specific homogeneous world, a whole that the author marked by her own unique view. Parallelism with the world of visual arts is also highlighted by many of the poems being titled with typical exhibition, gallery and professional terms, such as views and portraits, nudes and marinas, interiors and diptychs. Art terminology or a painting discipline serve as a kind of mask or 'persona' of the author's system, as visual correlation with the presaged. Namely, it is not a descriptive procedure or a paraphrase of optical facts, but a selection from received stimuli using a filter or a network of the codified language of an otherwise non-verbal creative practice. Perhaps we might say that in the latest collection Sanja Lovrenčić moves through the interspaces of talking about the visible and keeping silent about the unspeakable… (T. Maroević)
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Night-Time
Godina izdanja: 2009.
In her latest book of poems, Sanja Lovrenčić does not give up on the surreal, relocated and dreamy fabric of her poetic home. Depth, sky, water - and the circle, i.e. the island as its embodiment in the material, physical world, are the basic strongholds, motive-thematic veins, for her pungent and dark visions in verse. On this fantastic, but also ominous journey, during which dimensions and companions change, in the series of "rites of arrival and rites of departure", in which "the world becomes a black sparkler", we witness a literary and human questioning, flashes of awareness that the only possibility is endless circling, walking on the edge. But Sanja walks like Ariadne, with an invisible thread, like Anka (Žagar), in a garment of drinking water, and in her Orwellian circle she still reliably reaches the readers uncontaminated by the noises of the beginning of the 21st century. (Ivan Herceg, ed.) You can read eight poems from the book Night-time, translated for Södermalms Poesifestival 2011, in Swedish here.
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A River Certainly does Love the Flood
Godina izdanja: 2006.
Kiklop Award for the best poetry book, 2007 In her first poems Sanja Lovrenčić distanced herself in an elitist manner from the descriptiveness of reality and its usual subjects, but now in the collection A River Certainly does Love the Flood she approaches them in a relaxed manner equipped with elements of fairy tales – dreaminess, flax-ness and cotton-ness. Suddenly, for her, everything is utterable, without the pronounced use of the notional labyrinth or the figurative debris prominent with some other writers (...) Sometimes she would reach for the images that are close to a child's concept of the world. Naturally, it is only an excuse. We are dealing here with a skilful mimicry of childlike tameness and imagination by the complexity and even aggression of adulthood. For our times, the author is really a gentle poet (but not a coy nor a complaining one) who by no means wants to use parasitic additions to make beauty, but neither does she want to use those purely technical, artificial means with "witchcraft" intentions. She is interested in a "walk with pebbles". In all probably this is what contributed to her being the laureate of the Kiklop Award for the best poetry collection in the year 2007. (Sead Begović)
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In the Free Quarter
Godina izdanja: 2002.
In the Free Quarter is a collection than contains about seventy poems characterized by a gentle feeling of wonder and calm contemplation, on the trail of fluid and subdued surrealism. Some titles are intimating games of substitution of proportions and perspectives (“Berlin in my pocket”, “Landscape on the palm of my hand”, “As a cloud in a dream”, “The Door of the shortest day”, “For a voice of small range”), others suggest erudite paraphrases ... In any case, Sanja Lovrenčić writes a refined and elastic cantilena, characterized by associativity and ludic transformations. A certain neo-romantic tone breaks through a seemingly classically organized sequence, but economic distance is perhaps the most appropriate mask for the articulation of a muted scream. (Zvonimir Mrkonjić)
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Instructions for a Rambler in the Garden with Choirs
Godina izdanja: 2002.
The poetry collection Instructions for a Rambler in the Garden with Choirs consists of eight well- rounded cycles of poems. Long verses evoke some lived situations (the subtitle of the "Grande Arche de la Defense" is: diary-letter-travelogue) or they combine, vary and accumulate flexible syntagmas, merge perceptions, construct / constitute autonomous space. A significant dedication in memory of the poet Hrvoje Pejaković speaks about the search for a subtle interlocutor, of a kind of choice by kinship. Even though this poetry is not about symbols but about imaginative correlations, it is possible to discern the poet's preference for words with organic connotations, in fact notions from anthropological, biological or geological spheres. It is possible to recognize the same organic quality in the rhythm of her verses, which seek the impression of breathing or of the flow of running water. When the temperature of speech rises, things reach almost cosmological proportions, micro and macro worlds merge, introspection and esoteric images rhyme with phenomenological evidence (and even reduction), and verses flow with something like the elementality of verses written by Saint-John Perse. (Tonko Maroević)
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Scarlet Fabrics
Godina izdanja: 1994.
The opposition between words and the experiences named by these words is dreamily blurred; every trace of discursiveness, of anything that could be subjected to subsequent retelling, is carefully removed in order to open a space for a procession of wondrous scenes that these texts spread before the reader. The basic principles of the organization of poetic speech in Scarlet Fabrics are fragmentation and a certain "atonality" (the titles of some of the texts explicitly refer to the experience of atonal music). Thus, we will not be surprised that these poems function as an introduction into a space of complete intimacy where all duality is to be extinguished, and at the same time - as a mere superficial thematic analysis shows - as poetry of distance, exotic landscapes and finely patinated memories of ancient times... (Hrvoje Pejaković, ed.)
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Insula Dulcamara
Godina izdanja: 1987.
Sanja Lovrenčić self-published 100 copies of her first collection of poems in 1987; in 2012 it was republished in a slightly modified version, as an e-book, by the publishing house Mala zvona. ”Insula dulcamara“ – this "bittersweet island" shows how the author, almost unnoticed, started as a mature writer, with a dense poetic text that she defined as a series of "narratives", thus creating a somewhat ironic stance towards her poetic images. Prepared for the new edition, the manuscript has lost nothing of its original freshness, revealing the original hand of a reader, storyteller and fantasywriting poet who would continue to reveal herself in poetry and prose during the years that followed. (Lidija Dujić, ed.)
