Pavel Petr is an essentially Moravian lyrical poet and author who in his extensive works evokes spirituality and with an almost romantic obstinacy stresses emotion and intuition above reason and reflection. However, his first books (in particular Déšť ve vězení řeky, 1990) are burdened by eclecticism and ornamentalism. The influence of Jiří Kuběna’s monumentalism on the young poet led him to a poetry of strong pathos and expressivity, to an affected communication of religious experiences and to wide-ranging pronouncements, which lose their footing through their very desire for transcendence. However, this phase of Petr’s work is already characterised by free, irregular verse, fragmentary poetic speech and an unceremonious discharge of images which are interwoven at the boundaries of dream and reality. With the ensuing years and collections, more sensuality and more of the everyday enters this ever more captivating current of images. The poet from the baroque heights and distant lands of biblical archetypes gradually comes back down to earth, to reality, which, however, retains a symbolic character. In the same vein, the critic Jan Štolba distinguishes in Pavel Petr’s output to date “two tendencies which permeate his work: the first is an artificial tendency, an inclination towards verbalism, ornamentation and grand concepts floating freely outside of a stronger intellectual or figurative base. A propensity towards idioms and symbolic entities, with the a priori expectation that their mere ‘appearance’ will be enough to make a meaningful impression. The second current is more elemental, full of an inner rhythm and dynamic, making more use of direct sensations and sensuality, richly baroque in its notions and in its use of words.” Even in its title Petr’s most outstanding work of poetry to date, the collection S tebou tmavé louky roztroušených ostrovů [With You the Dark Meadows of Scattered Islands] (2004), demonstrates the author’s new poetic: an extensive poetical whole, or linked verses, which in the text stand first of all on their own and only then as a unity. He works with lexicon and syntax in an original manner, performs radical incisions into morphology and polemicises with a codification of the composition’s speech elements. Here the roots may be a poetical modernism but also a poetical experiment, specifically with the aesthetics of postmodernism. Who is writing this collection of formally transformed “elegies”, as the subheading goes, a book which intertwines and urgently, again and in many variations, announces the word of the title image “of dark meadows”? Is it being written by a poet of the inner model – the authentic imagination of a gifted surrealist, an innocent art brutist or a medium? Or a programmer of artificial beauty, a creator of a precipitously aesthetic communication albeit with a lyrical Apollinaire character? In some areas Pavel Petr’s collections show the way inside, words “from foreign lands are verses”, then further on he shows the way out: “I do not improvise; I only have the tempo of a machine inside.” Spiritual motifs still reverberate within his texts, but concurrent with these is space for carnality, eroticism and a desire for an expansive landscape. In spite of them, in the basically classical clues the reader often and easily sinks through or rather allows himself to be led somewhere outside: to the border of intelligibility and communication, to an area of irrationality and secrecy which vibrates and radiates in all directions through the mass of inner textual energy. And something within these “dark meadows of scattered islands” forces him to persevere without knowing exactly why and without even completely understanding the voice of his poet guide.
