Božanski pastir

The bulk of the book consists of selected poems from Šop's key collections ("Poems of a Poor Son", "With My Jesus", "From Early to Late Roosters", "At the Late Table" and others), then selected poetic prose and the complete drama "The Eternal Prelude".

Of particular value are additional documents:

• Šop's letters to Dragutin Tadijanović,
• his memories of meeting and friendship with the French Catholic poet Francis Jammes, who strongly influenced Šop's spiritual and poetic development.

Šop's poetry is characterized by a gentle, evangelical tone, a visionary experience of the world, motifs of Jesus as a shepherd, poverty, childhood, nature and everyday miracles. He often combines naivety with deep mysticism, humor with suffering, and the earthly with the divine – Jesus appears in modest, almost folk situations. The language is simple, picturesque, full of metaphors from everyday life, but it carries a strong spiritual weight.

This anthology best presents Šop as the "divine shepherd" of Croatian lyric poetry – a poet who shepherds the reader towards a quiet, profound encounter with the transcendent in a seemingly ordinary world.