Authors

With time, the strongly united, self-enclosed poetry of Fischerová has formed an arch. The domain of her laconic, simple, straightforward verse, free of forced stylization and polished figures, consists of the changes in life, love and loneliness as well as the constancy and capriciousness of existence. Her poetry is philosophically purist, devoid of external affectation and embellishment, continuously turning to the mythicization of our space-time continuum, shaped by a femininity that realizes itself through her relationships as partner, lover, wife and mother. The lyrical instruments she uses reflect the simplicity and lack of pretension in her work. Whenever landscape, earth or earthiness enter her lyric verse they do so as fragments of reality, yet they play no Novalis-like, post-Romanticist role for her. Rather than a mere backdrop or remnant of the veil of Maya, they are robust, mythical extracts of infinity, sequences and pillars between which the drama of life takes place and beyond which lies death, hidden as an eternal, astral presence, invisible, yet at once distant and close. Her literary debut, Zádušní mše za Pavla Buksu (Poems of Mourning for Pavel Buksa), is marked by the irrevocable loss of her husband, the writer Pavel Buksa, who used to publish under the pseudonym Karel Michal. This elegy set the tone for her future verse. It is an inner mosaic of the memories, touch, ecstasies and disappointments of love, confounded within the iciness of the never-ending flow of time, on whose shores we vainly build our temporary abodes out of the stones of love, compassion and words of poetry. The betrothal of the earthly and the divine, of ‘Breath and Spirit’ (as the poet Antonín Brousek put it) is a dominant feature of her collection Babí hodina (Indian-summer Hour), which resounds with the echo of the famous poem by František Halas, ‘Old Women’ . Whereas Halas points to the helplessness and uncertainty of the individual in the face of death, Fisherová, with a spark of barely discernible hope, illuminates the image of growing old and fading femininity. She thus departs from the metaphysical abyss of mortality found in metaphysical Baroque verse and touches upon the vestiges of our being both on Earth and in the heights of Heaven. In Fisherová’s verse, metamorphosis and transcendence lack the dark tinges of Holan’s work. Instead, it is permeated with everyday things, primary phenomena and events, which provide the matter the myth of the human race. Fully aware that time is unstoppable, Fischerová strives to achieve the apparently impossible – namely, to place at least a temporary barrier to its flow and for a moment, out of a gleam of beauty, to carve an immobile sculpture: ‘There is no virtue in ageing / To a woman / Men prefer to look away / I stand with my seized jewel / Right in the middle, invisible’. The title of the collection Odrostlá blízkost (Closeness Grown Apart) suggests that Fisherová is as much a poet of exile, external and internal, of being torn away from one’s home, no matter how much a stone of any human dwelling may also be the cornerstone of the home of all humanity. One neither ‘walks through the door’ nor ‘breaks in through a window’ to enter this stolen home, which with time is changed into a vividly tormenting dream. It is a home enclosed not by walls but by fragments of memories and hours of returning, a seeker’s pilgrimage with neither beginning nor end. At first, the poet disentangles herself from the snares of the deaths of loved ones by merging with an unobtrusive hedonism of impressions, and by returning to the world of current images, which one can relish only with the eye of solitude. Much of the verse in Odrostlá blízkost consists of drawings of the world, evocative of the work of the Anglo-American Imagists such as Amy Lowell and T.S. Eliot. As for them, the landscape of home, love and the relationship between the sexes is here a characteristic ‘wasteland’, the place where myth is born. The collection Matečná samota (Maternal Solitude) begins with Sylvia Plath’s words ‘a mind like a ring/ Sliding shut on some quick thing’. Fischerová is now moving towards a Cartesian view of the world, in which only the instruments of thought, reminiscence and memory, the relics of the world that fill our solitude, render tangible the contours of existence. The poems in Matečná samota are reminiscent of prayers or songs of worship, of a dialogue with the invisible, and ultimately the questions that the human being casts in the faraway face of God, questions that usually remain unanswered regardless of how much one clears the way to them by means of asceticism and solitude. In this her most recent collection, the Ovidian dimension of exile as the place of sorrow and torment is altered by the poet’s having forsaken return. Her exile becomes a resignation made possible by the voluntary solitude of the pilgrim in the desert, the monk lost in the phantoms of the past, from which God should once again be called back. The fraternity of mortals and the solitude of the Heavenly King thus do not create a uniform terra firma, connectedness and union. They are, instead, Böcklin’s two dark islands, between which one must drift upon the glassy surface of time.

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The profile was updated in 2007.

Deutsch  Viola FISCHEROVÁ, Deutsch.doc

En français Viola FISCHEROVÁ, En Francais.doc

Foreign rights

Dana Blatná Literary Agency, www.dbagency.cz