Multi-Layered Children’s Perspective in Peter Svetina’s Children’s Poetry

The paper focuses on the diversity of Svetina's children's poetry since his first book of verse, Mimosvet (2001), which is characterized by a shift from modernist poetic experiments towards the depiction of the children's world. His next book, Pesmi iz pralnega stroja (2006), returns to patterns of nonsense but also enhances them with linguistic provocation and lyricism. The most outstanding are two books: in the first, Domače naloge (2014), elements of nonsense can still be detected, while in the second, Molitvice s stopnic (2016), the poet fully returns to the realistic background of poetry related to a very unusual theme, namely, the relationship of the modern child to religion and God. The article draws parallels between his poetry and some of the most important examples of post-war poetic creativity. The intertextual comparisons conclude with a summary of the multilayered nature of Svetina's prose, which is characterized by an extraordinary variety of messages and genres.