Glamuzina aims to enchant the reader by layering aggressive and discreet provocations on at least three levels: the declarative, textual, and contextual level. Every passage from one level onto the other regularly breaks the just given promise and offers a new one, molding the book into an attractive, but hardly exhaustive verbal item.
Krešimir Bagić, 14 March, 2001
Jutarnji list
Butchers
Naklada MD, 2001, 64 pages
English translation available
Translation rights sold: Germany (Wieser Verlag, Klagenfurt, 2008.), Macedonia (Makedonska reč, Skopje, 2008.), Slovenia (Litera, Maribor, 2001), Serbia (Naklada Profil, Belgrade 2008.)
This collection of poems presents the reader with that part of male-female relations we could, in line with the title of the collection, without hesitation call butchering, a mutual tattoo, a fight for the right of the voice of the Other.
This is a narrative poetry that will appeal to the readers of Henry Miller, Charles Bukowski, Anais Nin or Raymond Carver.
The book is based on a precise statement of the speaker, who determines himself against his Argonautic explorer nature and desire “to be calm”. Brought in to the stage of events and surprised by its existing state, the participants meet in almost classical situations that authenticate the story of the body – the body and its passions and fears, its desire and newfound secrets; the body exposed, disturbed, interlaced with scars “given” to men and women. But Glamuzina is a sensitive reader of the state of language, he controls the journey to the world of his intimacy; the investment of his own skin in the text and its exposure to the face of the world are timed and given in a balance of sexuality and eroticism, privacy and publicity, melancholy and complacence. However, the most beautiful part of the Butchers is the one that doesn’t succumb to direct intervention of the critic or the reader: through a remarkable poetic intonation and a provocative thematic inventory, this collection of poems persists in the quest for lashes of invisible fins through the Universe, through literature, films, through unspeakable music of the spheres.
Butchers won the most prestigious national award Vladimir Nazor for Book of the Year and the Kvirin Prize for the Best Book of Poetry and is one of the most important collection of modern Croatian poetry.