Night Jasmine and the Ethics of Attention: Goran Gatalica’s Poetics Between Science and Silence

Abstract

This extended critical feature examines the poetry of Croatian poet Goran Gatalica as a distinctive instance of contemporary minimalist poetics situated at the intersection of scientific discipline, ethical attention, and cross-cultural haiku practice. Drawing on his formal training in physics, chemistry, and engineering, Gatalica develops a poetics characterized by precision, restraint, and an ethics of observation that resists rhetorical excess. Through close theoretical positioning and contextual reading, this essay argues that Gatalica’s work exemplifies an international lyric grounded not in abstraction or exoticism, but in attentive engagement with silence, locality, and empirical reality. Structured in three parts, the study moves from intellectual biography and theoretical framing, to a curated bilingual haiku corpus with commentary, and finally to a book-length reading of Night Jasmine as a peace-oriented poetics of ethical minimalism. Rather than treating haiku as a formal exercise, the essay situates it as an ethical compression of experience, aligning poetic practice with scientific humility and moral restraint. In doing so, the feature positions Gatalica’s work within a living global network of contemporary haiku and minimalist poetry, while articulating its relevance to current debates on attention, silence, and responsibility in lyric writing.