Pesmi iz rimogojnice

The basic poetic approach in the collection of Andrej Rozman Roza (1955), one of the most unique contemporary Slovene authors, is already indicated in the title. The title word “rhymefarm” differs in Slovene only by a single letter from the word “fishfarm”: word play, the main thing that characterises the poet's attitude to language and the world in general, is thus a poetic procedure that transforms everyday words into unusual and thus surprising, even provocative ones. The poetry is thus concealed among everyday words, objects, phenomena: even tiny imaginative changes of the point of view cause unpoetic, even banal motifs to transform into a play of experience – and the known suddenly appears completely unknown. The game of transforming the everyday can be a play on words that are similar, a play of rhymes at the end and within verses, a play of echoes or a playful alliteration of linking words. The poetic language is in itself already unusual –the use of colloquial forms also greatly contributes to this – and similarly in the world of the “rhymefarm” the depiction of objects are unusual (e.g., shoelaces, braces, school benches) and animals, which are transformed into inquisitive and independent poetic personages. Childlike nonsense “logic” has a central place in this collection (a child is also often the lyrical subject), and the poetic game, in addition to material from the contemporary world, also embraces elements of tradition (fable, water sprite, dwarfs) so it is explicitly inter-textual and offers a great opportunity for the reader's discourse with literature in general.