Authors

As Fabian himself confesses in a poem from the collection Field of Refraction, he is a poet of the ways which have abandoned the walker. His echoing voice, bathed in the waters of the past, is a mythology of lost Czech provinces, a home in solitude and seclusion, places and chapels in fields populated by rooks in errant flight. Fabian does not write of the resplendence of summer days and nights; his element and season is autumn, a leaning into the long-term cold of winter, in extreme cases permeated by the flame of human passion. That Fabian – a several-time winner of the Seifert Poetry Prize – is a practitioner of finely-honed verse was apparent in his debut work The House Between the Windows, a collection of his verse from 1997 to 1999. He is a cool constructor of the exact and pertinent metaphor; his metaphysical enjambement is reminiscent of Holan. To the darker, neo-baroque notes of a Holan or a Halas, marked by the dominance of disillusion, he adds a tone suggestive of the foolish faith of modern man, who lives on the bank opposite to that of the Christian god. On his journeys and wanderings from the absence to the presence of faith, from doubt and sin to the certainty of asceticism, there appears to the Fabian of the poems the figure of a deeply spiritual late-medieval pilgrim – a fictional being whose sole purpose is to stifle the loneliness of the way by means of his human shadow. In the poem Evening Impromptu (in The House Between the Windows) we read a kind of summary of a muted poet’s education, of an intellect so far youthful and disciplined. In his view the clouds compare themselves to the stars, the music of the grass is evil, and all is nothingness; even the nothingness is “lost to us”. As with Holan, who in his Mozartiana cycle has cause to exclaim, “But it is music”, Fabian, too, embraces within himself a presentiment of some kind of underground voice – a music which “will provide the time” to our darkness, the darkness in our hearts. In The House Between the Windows we see for the first time how Fabian’s lyrical records and images alternate with more ordinary, more prosaic wordings – characterized by the author as the records of dreams in which an impression of lyricism is interlaid with traces of a scene, plot or events more concrete. This element of Fabian’s work can be compared with Footprints and Other Prosaic Writings by Jakub Deml, of whom Fabian is a great admirer. From this blaspheming and heretical priest of poetry – whose work is full of unexpected rising passions – Fabian’s path has led him to other authors of similar mood, notably to Bohuslav Reynek of Petrkov and the Stará Říše publisher Josef Florian, a supporter of Leon Bloy. Fabian’s motif of the lost, snow-covered path is amplified in his second collection Field of Retraction, which differs from his early work by the way in which it is obviously testing the way and also the resonance of its eclecticism and self-mimicry. In this second volume Fabian is not at pains to display or enrich his poetics, rather to secure it, to proceed with it towards the perfection of an established routine. Once again the key words are “darkness”, “twilight”, “dawn”, “autumn”, “silence”, “stillness”, “cemetery”, “surface”, “rain”, “snow”, “face” and “land”. Only here and there does the laconic poet’s brush reach for the name of a particular village, the loneliness of the small rural community, abandoned and seemingly cut off from the chaos and radiance of the town. We read a warning against tying oneself down recklessly and the subsequent need for steadfastness. The motive force in these poems is movement only metaphysical, a barely perceptible tropism like activity within a plant, which is imperceptible to the eye. Openings in the Half-light, Fabian’s most recent book of poetry – published in the form of a New Year card for 2004 – suffers from an onslaught of the metaphysical and an otherworldliness which has little power to communicate. In this work Fabian shifts his focus from the phenomenal to the substantial and abstract, examining the poet’s voice of Rilke from the perspective of today. These latest poems please by the way in which they rediscover a holiness spurned and lost, though this is achieved through the use of well-known and well-worn metaphors, loans from the literary heritage. For now Petr Fabian remains a pilgrim poet, questing after an original and inimitable voice.

(js)

E-mail: p.fabian@seznam.cz

This author profile was last updated in 2006

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