Authors

Norbert Holub’s first work of poetry, Zrcadlo pod jevištěm [The Mirror Under the Stage] (1989), was in line with the officially published poetry of the 1980s. However, in many ways we already have a foretaste of the first period of the author’s work, whether it concerns various literary historical references, a fondness for wordplay, a perception of reality as “the theatre of the world” or the somewhat blasphemous projection of Christian myths onto the demythologized present. The form of Holub’s early works was characterized by free-flowing verse and more extensive, dramatically structured compositions.

His second work Muž vymýšlející vejce [Man Inventing the Egg] (1990) has a similar poetic tone, though of course more elaborate, more mature and more grotesque. The texts are distinctly stylized so that they resemble a theatrical script (Představení [The Performance] ), a newspaper (Zvláštní vydání [Special Edition] ) and so on. The poet becomes not only a witness to world events, where he comes into contact with Hamlet and the Holocaust, but also the producer of his visions. His theatrical view of the world corresponds to his fascination with the paintings of Heironymous Bosch, who inspired him to produce a series of studies and verbal variations. The poet contrasts the medieval world with the present, and through a bizarre Bosch-ian grimace he also indirectly criticizes the closed bourgeois world and an art fossilized in monuments and collections of writings: “…but the fish have already gnawed through the tins/and are sprawled/across the streets, squares and parks.”

In terms of form, the author up until now had strictly kept to free verse.

In his third offering, a collection called & (1995), alongside Holub’s verses we also find Luděk Navara’s texts in what is a rather unique entry in the poet’s bibliography. This is due not only to the presence of another artist, but mainly to the unusual emphasis on the grotesque. The book became a kind of spontaneous reaction to postmodernism, which is reflected here and into whose structures the authors introduced the most bizarre counterpoints (see Navara’s section Vladimír Remek & Božena Němcová). Finally, its main concern is poetry’s clean break from the private sphere, and into this theatrical world step fictional and historical characters, as well as personalities from literature and popular culture. What is more, here for the first time Holub manages to rein in his wide-ranging compositions into regular verse, as though he were formally and thematically preparing the ground for his next works. And despite the poetry’s high-spiritedness, even here there is a more serious undertone.

The collection Cizí sonety [Foreign Sonnets] (1996) sees the complete rebirth of Norbert Holub as a strict poet with an extremely concise form, though of course maintaining his previous irony, special sense of humour and scepticism. Again we could call Cizí sonety an intertextual postmodern play, though its level of sophistication distinguishes it from its predecessor. Here Holub transposes into a sonnet (or quasi-sonnet) form extracts from other authors; he is interested in the transformation of free verse and prose to a fixed form. As he himself says, it is not about “copying the author’s style or paraphrasing him”, but it is rather a “rigorous following through of the ideas suggested”. Holub’s self-confessed attempts at “remakes, remixes and cover versions” bring together a work under the noteworthy subtitle of Uncopyrighted, which contains the “reworked” texts of the evangelists, through to Witold Gombrowicz, Richard Brautigan, Max Frisch, Jiří Kolář, Gottfried Benn (Benn’s hospitals and autopsy rooms are particularly close to Holub’s world) and Jan Zábran, whose life and works are of special interest to the poet. (Apart from this, Holub also “remixed” the Bosch cycle from his own collection Muž vymýšlející vejce.)
In the final section we find versified extracts from the memoirs of Jan Zábran’s mother, where her life and her son’s life are projected onto the background of the dramatic events of the 20^th century.

In the fifth collection, Úplně úzké úly [Extremely Narrow Beehives], we find Holub a formally masterful poet. We are immediately impressed by the non-standard rhymes, whose originality of creation occasionally sacrifices the fluency, musicality and rhythm of the poem, though never its onomatopoeia: “Ryk masa dojásal. / Bezmasá melasa.” [The mass’s uproar was moving. /Meat-free molasses.]  His work as a doctor means that Holub is obsessed by the human body and especially by its mortality. The repeated Christian motifs again form a kind of ironic response to this almost Baroque perception of finality, which is reflected in the author’s observations on nature: “In the gardeners’ colonies/ the foetuses of worm-filled compost heaps / whose cores then host / you, who at least on the surface rot.” Otherwise Holub’s poetry has become more personal and there are references to specific places and localities; childhood memories and romantic tones can be heard which the author had practically ignored before. Naturally, Holub’s humour is also present.

His last collection to date, Suché sochy stínů [The Dry Sculptures of Shadows] develops the momentum of the formal bravura of the previous collection with similar structures and themes: “Birth gives flowers their fragrance/ and graves are a good foundation for a house.” The everyday experience of work in the hospital, the proximity of death, the awareness of futility – these motifs, present de facto in all of Holub’s works, are given full vent here. The new use of the plural appears relatively frequently (“We stood in line for a fresh past…”), as though the poet was no longer only speaking for himself, but rather wanted to generalize his feelings – at least generationally. It is as though his gaze is fixed on a memory; he tries to stop and reconstrust the passing moment in a Proustian manner, while at the same time not forgetting the surrounding reality: “The optimism of the slimy billboards/ glorifying an unrestrained security…” And because the poetry of Norbert Holub has two faces – serious and playful – we can also find in the collection Suché sochy stínů several absurd or nonsensical sketches to counteract the author’s tragic facets.

(jn)