Srečko Kosovel: The Poet and I

The Poet and I is an unconventional biography of the Slovenian writer, Srečko Kosovel, the leading avant-garde poet from between the two World Wars, who died at the age of twenty-two in 1926 and only posthumously entered the country’s poetic canon as one of its most revered literary icons.  From the unique standpoint of Erica Johnson Debeljak’s own experience as a “voluntary exile”, she movingly evokes the feelings of Kosovel when he became what she terms a “stationary exile”, that is when his home village in Slovenia suddenly became part of Italy after the First World War. She strives to enliven the received images about Kosovel: the prophetic and morbid death obsession, the student years with no money, his urban loneliness in Ljubljana, and his love for his lost Karst.  The poetry and correspondence of Kosovel are given new life by this original and personal “reading” and the author manages to excavate a story of love and vibrancy from the death cult that has surrounded the poet.