Poetry of Another Reality

At first glance it seems that Nikola Šop’s poetry does not fit into the course of development of prose poems in Croatian literature. In this new anthology, introduced by the cycle of “lyric prose”, A Discourse on Smoke, which is not mentioned in the foreword, this poet is always somehow separated, set aside, even though his presence has been conspicuously continual and tangible, from the collection Songs of the Poor Son 1926 to Tremende in 1988 – yet a strange, essentially “new” reality which the poet shapes in his “space” poetry has distanced him and his poems from a firm support base in criticism itself and particularly from a notable place in Croatian literature.