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Six Czech Poets

Six Czech Poets

ed. Alexandra Büchler

Bilingual English / Czech edition

Zbyněk Hejda, Petr Borkovec, Petr Halmay, Pavel Kolmačka, Kateřina Rudčenková, Viola Fischerová;

Translated by Alexandra Büchler, Justin Quinn, James Naughton with an introduction by Alexandra Büchler

Part of our New Voices From Europe and Beyond series edited by Alexandra Büchler

'Six Czech Poets' is the third volume in the series of bilingual anthologies which brings the work of contemporary poets from Europe and beyond to a wider English-language readership, a series which aims to keep a finger on the 'here and now' of international contemporary poetry.

The six poets whose work is included in this collection have become known to the wider Czech readership in the past ten to fifteen years, despite the fact that they belong to two very different generations: the generation exiled by the totalitarian regime of pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia — whether from public literary life or from the country itself — and the younger generation which started publishing in the late 1990s. Both were faced with the task of mending the broken continuity of Czech poetry, reclaiming the sources of its inspiration — whether it may be the subconscious and dreams, the undercurrents of human relationships, or closely observed everyday objects and situations which acquire a poetic and ontological significance — and, ultimately, with the task of restoring the very medium of poetic expression, language itself.

Parallel text: Czech / English

The poets are talented, enjoyable and interesting. This is a valuable edition to a surprisingly neglected field (apparently no anthology of Czech verse has appeared in English since the fall of the Berlin wall). If it interests English speakers in the riches of Czech poetry, it will have served a worthwhile purpose.

Ross Cogan, Acumen 62, Sep 2008

Paperback
150 pages
ISBN: 978 1904614 18 0
Published February 2008

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