I hope the good master Boccaccio doesn’t hold it against me if I employ a mildly paraphrased title of his august classic for the present anthology of ten contemporary Slovene poets. Certainly, the similarities aren’t too farfetched: like those sundry ten narrators assembled in the Decameron in the midst of the charming Florentine countryside, entertaining each other with stories to flee the Black Death, an equal number of diverse poets coalesce within the channels of this anthology, divining in their verses and idiosyncrasies the orbis pictus of the human soul and contemporary reality through the singular prism of the Slovene linguistic essence. Gathered from manifold currents of the national poetic milieu, these authors do not represent a particular generation or homogenous artistic community but rather ten strictly personal, intimate, subjective visions of the world, ten different lyrical writings, verse-craftings, rhythms and meters: thus deca metron …
Nevertheless, Cvetka Bevc, Ivan Dobnik, Maja Vidmar, Cvetka Lipuš, Miha Obit, Primož Čučnik, Lucija Stupica, Jurij Hudolin, Miklavž Komelj and Andrej Hočevar do exhibit certain shared patterns: they were all born between 1960 and 1980, they all belong to the ripening young harvest of Slovene lyricism and as such attest to its current creative manifestations, horizons, eruptions and artistic value; and furthermore all of them are – with their published collections, awards and prizes – already well-established authors of Slovene literature, appearing, not least, for the first-ever time before the Italian readership.
From the foreword by Miran Košuta
Edited by: Miran Košuta
Selected by: Miran Košuta
Afterword: Miran Košuta
ISBN: 978-961-6547-40-6
Pages: 157
Price: 10,00 EUR