Summary
Martina Vidaić: City: construction
The poetry collection City: construction by Martina Vidaić is a logical continuation, the motifs of the title already suggest it, her previous poetry books Trg, tržnica, nož. The armature of the new collection consists of poems with the image of Rusalka, four poems about earthquakes, three about memorial plaques and the deaths of women, and seven poems "Poet shares a post: ...".
Titles that mention a city, a square, a lake, a house... could outline the cartography and floor plan of the collection. This time, Martina's poems are of shorter stanzas, almost interrupted, as if they themselves were broken by some internal earthquake, sometimes of only one verse, which finely emphasizes their weight and density, the picturesque thinking that is mainly concentrated around the motifs that, according to one poem, we should call a dark gospel. And centered, which shows the longing for symmetry, orderliness and provides an opposition that creates formal tension towards the content.
One of the frequent motifs of the collection is a house, which is just being planned or is being built or is falling into disrepair, another is water, which is usually associated with death, without any pathos or lamentation. But the main character, with whom Martina Vidaić has a close relationship, is language, which peers into the darkness (thereby illuminating it), builds and destroys cities, people, us.
Kruno Lokotar
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