Glorjana Veber
- Slovenia -
Dr. Glorjana Veber (1981) graduated from political science at Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana, and has a PhD in literature (Poetry - the Element of Social Change) at Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She also finished all exams in MA in sociology with the thesisThe influence of lifestyles on book purchases and some other exams at Faculty of Economics. Her poems are translated in 21 languages. She received a few Slovene and international poetry awards. She was founder and director of the IRIU Institute, where was engaged in developing experimental projects from the field literature. Her first book The Free Fall was published in 2013, the second (2015) Someone Before in Italy. She worked in private and public institutions as strategy manager, director, head of public relations etc. Today she is director of company for creative and scientific solutions IRIU.
The title of Glorjana Veber's first poetry collection, namely The Free Fall, is but a metaphor for the act of creation. She who creates takes a step - a leap, perhaps -, a definitive step into an undefined territory - a depth, perhaps. Many of us, readers, have more and more reservations about poetry involved with itself, with it's own conditions, because, if we borrow the words of the literary critic Lidija Gačnik, this type of poetry can easily become a symptom of a lack of content or material. It is not so with Veber, Gačnik conludes, mostly because these layers of Veber's poetry are composed well within the intimate and personal. The poet and critic David Bedrač wrote: »The poetry of Glorjana Veber brings about a deeply intimate confession, whereas these intimistic inclinations are neatly connected, matched and developed with some other ideas. The biopsy of this poetic tissue quickly reveals the presence of certain surrealistic elements (the interpretation of dreams, certain situations and time), postmodernism (the female subject is an intellectual who is unable to shake off many of historical poetic concepts, poetic influences of the Slovene grandfathers of poetry are more or less visible, Zajc in the poem Names, Gregorčič in Earth etc.), whilst modernistic layers are most pronounced on the level of the linguistical structure.« Veber avoids syntactic norms, which shows the subject's rebellion against the norms of the language - a modernistic feature and experiment in it's finest.
But The Free Fall is not only an experiment, Bedrač concludes. Maybe it is such only in the first phase, within the genesis of the poem, when it seems that the lyrical subject is open to conundrum, the wind, motion. »But then this freedom ceases,« Bedrač analyses, »which the poetess shows by using some of the finest features of style and an exceptional series of metaphors. The metaphorical chains are plastic, effective, original, their connective tissue is formed in various ways. Most often they are passages of thought, splashes at the end of a verse, which spill into the next one. These spills are intellectual, socially engaged (the subject discusses the worthlessness of an intellectual's work inexorably), but it is also feminine, soft.«
The critic Mojca Pišek specifically exposed three of Veber's poems as the most characteristic of her poetry: Names, Fire and Drop. According to Pišek, these poems represent the poetess's values the most. All three have certain common features and aim to be a representation o fan insight. »They deal with conditions of big changes, also violent, abrupt, in the last poem with a type of an apocalypse. Names brings forth an almost unimaginable change in the sphere of human culture. In the poem, a virus that erases names of things and concepts, appears.« Even more definitive are Fire and Drop; they both welcome the symbol of fire. »With his help the author draws genuine images, in the first a burning site of a room, in the second the whole planet and civilisation are caught in fire. Whilst the first poem, despite the fire that engulfs all our possessions, brings forth the insight that nothing ours can actually burn down, which supports a calming feeling of emptiness,« the second poem expands the image of fire - in it, even the emptiness burns and in those flames a drop of water rests. »This surreal image,« Pišek states, »of a living drop in the midst of a fire is a metaphor of everything that we can't access on this side of reason.« And this inaccessibility is the core of Veber's poetry, the original and final quest of all her verses: the break of reason and the beginning of humanity.
Poetry
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In God's proximity / v bližini boga
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Elections /
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160 metres before birth / 160 metrov pred rojstvom
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Universe / Vesolje
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Human / Človek
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Music / Glasba
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In proximity of fear / V bližini strahu
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History / Zgodovina
