Authors

Halmay’s landscape is more often than not night. From Homer, Ovid, and Biblical times this is a night illuminated by celestial light, a natural effulgence flowing into even the darkest corners and gullies of existence. For modern man darkness does not necessarily mean becoming immersed in quiet meditation. The contemporary world is lit by artificial light, which has lost its aura of uniqueness and become mundane. Civilization has done away with the fog of magic and the unattainablity of the bright skies. Perhaps this is why Halmay has titled his latest collection Taillights. These may be the blinking red taillights of a car moving off into the distance, or the gust of melancholy that overcomes one standing on a railway platform looking at the rear lights of a vanishing train. Of course they could also be the glimmer from the metaphysical “final” light of life, which in our minds is associated with the realm of the dead where not only a guttering candle lights a cemetery chapel, but the same light that shines in kitchens, studies, or other rooms at night where we have simply forgotten to turn out the lights. From his first poetry collection Strašná záře [Terrible Glow], comprising his juvenile work form the 1980s, through his latest, the sophisticated Taillights, one can see in Halmay’s work a type of artistry, a skilled hand burnishing words and language that is always operating within the confines of a fixed and stable image and story, which often forms the epicenter of his poems. Into such limpid imagery, Halmay lets seep at times the poison of doubt about poetry and literature in general, skepticism about the purpose of communication with others, even doubts about the mythical, which on the one hand seems to have exceeded the confines of his verse while on the other have continued to fascinate despite his misgivings. “The old physical world” and the “undeniable gaze” directed at it both have remained a continual temptation for Halmay. Individual situations and states, concrete phenomena, and the factual construction of being frequently overflow Halmay’s verse onto the artificially floodlit stage of the Teatrum mundi, or into the fleeting, documentary snapshots and records without content, message, point, and therefore in no need of additional commentary. “This entire situation had almost no content,” because an empathetic poet first must come to grips with the stage-sets of the world (an expression he often uses) and only then look offstage for the enduring, living, human, for this is where we might discover content or transcendence. In his poetry, Halmay is forever the observer, not an actor or commentator. In Taillights, as in the collection preceding it, Bytost [A Being] – which is a bit more verbose and less structured, as if more rhapsodic – the lyrical subject takes on the position of one who creeps and crawls around the façades and morphology of the city, along the immovable and fixed buildings and walls, window scenes and the lights within, which although they might change in the spiral of time remain essentially undisturbed. “During morning work breaks / workmen stand by a faded low wall, / a hospital’s façade dimly shows / through the green of May.” Only in the final strophe of “The Old, Physical World” does a slice of the city open to the observer through a chink or peephole: “Rain silently soaks the Vinohrady cobbles / pealing on the roofs of sleepy garages.” Prague and its particular districts (Vinohrady with its pomposity of pseudo-urbane architecture and decadence of a bygone era, the industrial peripheries of Holešovice and Bráník where a different, natural story takes places behind the torn curtain) are the “settings” for Hamlay’s serene, somewhat cool poetry, a juggling poetry at times, though puristic in a restraint verging on the hermetic. “Somewhere deep in Holešovice / a mother sets to write another page …” Allusions to family chronology, though often it is a flight to the nearest being (woman, son, father), is a second fundamental component in his sensitive, unsentimental, and sober lyricism. As opposed to these Zen-like text-images of Taillights, Halmay’s previous collections were more illusory, playing with the “terrible glow” that pursues a “being” or has directly issued from him. “Amid this what we consider reality / the moment faded / through the image, the illusion of the city, / sun setting over football stadium / Sparta” we read in one of the Illusions which serve as the leitmotif running through the collection A Being. But it is through this labyrinth of the unreal, dreams, chimeras, and illusions that the poet makes his way, forging through the “outskirts of an innocent evening” to a “lookout awash in blind light,” half struggling, half in a sensual euphoria bursting into the image of beings and being. It is certainly apt that A Being carries an epigraph by Max Hermann about the moon, on which stand “mills orphaned by winter,” “darkened as after a fire, the forest of nerves shining all around,” again ending in a “metaphor of light”: “The body gleams without reason / in endless silence.” Halmay’s lyricism largely stands apart from the grating and laborious poetry being written in Czech today. He carves from himself a “magnificent, dazzling being,” even though in the same breath (and in the same poem) he acknowledges that it will be created injured, unhappy … “legless … mute … with a gouged eye.” And it is also surrounded by silence, and sometimes sound is violently extirpated from Halmay’s fixed images. The motif of stillness, unfinished utterances is the legacy of Vladimír Holan. Halmay’s poetry is a throwback to the great lyrical concepts of the twentieth century, and therefore he is a loner, difficult to compare with anyone among today’s poets. Perhaps his work is close to Štěpán Nosek’s or the poise of Radek Malý. Where his poetry tries to capture the ephemeral atmosphere of the deserted countryside, of courtyards cast into the mirrors of pools and reservoirs collecting rainwater, it comes close to the verse of Pavel Kolmačka and Jaromír Zelenka. The motifs of transience and death, which are nevertheless essentially powerless as they are nothing but the offshoot of omnivoracious time, places Halmay closer to Rilke (The Book of Images) than to the mercilessness and uncompromising trenchancy of František Halas. They might recall a photographic process that sometimes violently if not willfully works with time. Meditating on the suspended, fixed image is Halmay’s specialty and connects him to Eastern philosophy where the image and silence stands in opposition to action, words, and loud sound. After all, Halmay’s only collection to date that includes prose as well as poetry is symbolically titled Hluk [Noise].

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