Ales Debeljak. Ispod povrsine.

Pantovic, Bojana Stojanovic

Ales Debeljak. Ispod povrsine. Edo Ficor, tr. Zagreb. Hrvatsko drustvo pisaca / Durieux. 2006. 76 pages. 80 kn. ISBN 953-7342-08-5

THE MOST RECENT poetry book is the eighth in a row from Ales Debeljak (b. 2961), a distinguished Slovenian and Central European poet. The title of Ispod povrsine (Under the water's surface) immediately stimulates the reader's horizon of expectations. Central to the book is the lyrical voice that reveals itself in the six carefully composed groups, each containing six individual poems. In the multiple tones it assumes, the voice echoes off an iceberg's tip under which signs and images of continental cultural-historical memory are suspended in liquid dreams. This frozen memory is unlocked in fascinating cascades of metaphorical sequences that attempt to attain a balance in the moment.

This is what the book pursues throughout: the moment of condensed time and space that has the power to bring forth, in a flash of illumination, all the defeated and victorious peoples. It is their legacy of violence, both ancient and contemporary, that the poems trace in historical sediments of sunken monarchies from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterraneans and the Balkans, from the Crimean Peninsula to the Urals.

The lyrical subject's carnal desire and spiritual homesickness fluctuate just as the aesthetically attractive images flow, suggesting the omnipresence of water, this symbol that at once speaks for the destructive masculine and the healing feminine force. By subjecting his poetic style to the inherent demands of the content, Debeljak renders the border between internal and external perception irrelevant. Now it's the lyrical subject itself that appears as the linguistic materialization of specified exteriors, such as the cities of Prague, Vierma, Trieste, Ljubljana, Dresden, and Barcelona. In fact, this creative engagement with the dangerous yet potentially redeeming "other" is the undertow that has driven Debeljak's imagination since his first poetry book was published in 1982. Here's a current example: "The earlobes I want to nibble, I admit, somewhere else, on the Turkish / side of Cyprus, in the towns that keep all disgrace for themselves / and again I return to the water surface to catch a breath beyond the edge of screen."

This screen, this interface, implies the "multitude of identities" among which the poet adopted the role of social outsider, which, in turn, gives him freedom to descend to the muddy bottom of memory. Here, he poetically examines individual and collective choices, the better to appropriate fragments of mythological, historical, and national imaginaries into his own. The process of sifting through the ambiguous legacy of ancestors gets recast as a personal journey, dramatized as it is by the Odysseus-like wanderings and oblique references to classical ancient heritage. In layered scenes, emerging from cinematically accelerated verses, Ales Debeljak's "traveling" style is an appropriately subtle instrument to suggest despair, nostalgia, guilt, and repentance while evoking sublime erotic experience, farewell, love, and longing for the unattainable divinity.

Bojana Stojanovic Pantovic

University of Novi Sad