Ćopić’s Poetic Prose and Prose Poetry: My Girl from Bosanska Krupa and the Garden of Hollyhock Color

Abstract

This paper will analyze the narrative elements in the poetry collection My girl from Bosanska Krupa and the poetic elements in the collection of stories The garden of hollyhock color. The books were published in 1971 and 1970 respectively, and are among the most important texts by Branko Copic, in which the author, in his full maturity, returns thematically to his childhood days. Childhood and youth,
village and family, as part of a world created in a text, at the level of the readers’ experience, blend into a unique space and experience written from the same distance and in a mode of nostalgia. On the other hand, the textual construction of the world of youth is realized in two genre-wise different books: poetry and prose. The analysis shows that, although different, these two books at the semantic level can be read as one whole in which the elements of narrative and poetic discourse intertwine.