Martina Vidaić

- Croatia -

Martina Vidaić was born in Zadar, Croatia on February 19, 1986. She graduated in Croatian language and literature at the University of Zadar. In 2011 she won the Goran prize for young poets. At this occasion her first book of poetry Era gmazova was published. After that, she participated in several international festivals and readings. In 2016 her new collection Tamni čovjek Birger was published (VBZ, Zagreb). 

 

Besides poetry, she writes short stories, but so far only two of them were published.


The collection of poems by Martina Vidaić is characterized by metaphorically rich, polyvalent sentences, a lucid junction between different layers of language and the lightness with which a fresh and innovative order of things is created with the usual, every-day language.

 

The book opens with the sentence "this is the era of  reptiles". The enigmatic feeling of the opening of the first poem is at the base of the poet's style. However, it is not a closed, hermetic, dark writing. Between the intertwined metaphors and images peeks a lyrical heroine who, by using elements of the confessional poetry style, sometimes leads the reader through her richly articulated world.

 

Her lyrical world is based in the local and private: in the yard, at home, in a dead-end street, but this world suddenly unflods before readers' eyes into its own mythological time and the mythological beginning, into the unique genesis of the world, written with the help of a "reptilian dictionary".

 

The dominant motive in Vidaić's poetry is the family - mother, father and sister, as well as neighbors from the dead-end street. Different poems thematize kaleidoscopic shifts in their identities, according to the poem's immanent logic of the image transformation.

 

Vidaić's poetry is built from open metaphors that do not end, but continue and evoke a new sequence of images that come through the cracks of the previous ones. And comparisons, often risky place in poetry, in this book offer interesting contiguities.

 

On a formal level, Vidaić's poems are built of a syntactically regular structure of the verses, while the rhythm, as a kind of intimate poet's signature, is based on semantic entanglings and unwindings, and the constitution of sense is dynamized by the literary and film references and signals.

 

A journey through Vidaić's poems is a move through semiotic tunnels at the end of which awaits us - not a conclusion, the reduction or the point - but the serenity of the new insights into the complex and dynamic relations of things and beings.