Little Bells – poetry

In the new poetry book by the acclaimed and award-winning Croatian poet Ivan Babić, “Chet Baker on the Beach”, the readers will notice, on the one hand, the maturity, clarity of concept and stylistic certainty of this experienced writer, and on the other hand his talent for a short form that unites the lyrical and the meditative, and within which the author manages to transform elements of sensory, organic reality into imaginative metaphor. The dominant thematic framework of these subtle poems is love. The foreboding of opening up to another person, the fragility of closeness, unrest, hope and absence alternate like musical variations in a book that is, as the title already testifies, inspired and imbued with music. Music is, however, most present in the poems of the central, titular cycle, where it appears in a multiple role – as an incentive for language, as a possibility of dialogue across the barriers that separate different artistic disciplines, as an embodiment of psychological states and moods. Breath and respiration run through the manuscript as an organic link between music and song, but also as the presence of the living world of nature for which the author shows a special sensitivity (noted in his previous collections). Babić’s sense of language is manifested in lexical abundance, a flexible sentence that manages to remain light despite its complexity, an imaginative but unobtrusive creation of neologisms, and the ability to create a small, concise and rounded whole with well-chosen words.