Poets

Zvonko Maković(1947), the poet and art-historian, has been awarded the coveted Goranov vijenac (Goran's Wreath), a Croatian national award, for his overall poetic opus. He writes poetry, critiques of visual arts, essays, columns and scientific papers in the field of contemporary art.

The poems of Zvonko Maković deal with the particulars of place, details of objects of everyday use left on the table in his room, sometimes even with the names of real people and haphazard views taken from the window on days that could not be distinguished from other days in the continuum of human existence, except – perhaps - in the highly individual and arbitrary act of photographic registration of fragments of reality.

In the motto of his collection titled Fear, Maković quotes a line from The Death of Virgil by Broch: "I lacked patience in comprehension / and that is why I wanted to write all / because nothing is more poetic than that.”His urban poetry, written in a simple language and style, concentrates on the immediate environment. Running through all of his work is what might be called existential suspicion. He questions reality and disbelieves easy recipes of the sublime. The lyrical voice in his poems exists between commas of an attempt to describe the world of objects taken as they are. His imaginative awareness of experience is concentrated, but completely devoid of the possibility to transcend reality by using metaphors. His poetry of intellectual qualm is very far from the phe..