The poet Vít Slíva was born on the 11th of January 1951 in Hradec u Opavy. He studied Czech and Latin at the Faculty of Arts in Brno and then became a teacher. He worked for a short time in primary schools and then at the gymnasium in Brno-Královo Pole. He is now a teacher at the Mladecko primary school. He won the Magnesia Litera prize in 2002 for his collection of poetry entitled Bubnování na sudy (Weles, 2002). He lives in Opava.
By 1990 Slíva had brought out three collections of poetry; they were those of a reclusive young poet who had searched long and hard for the means to be published. His debut work, with the characteristic title of Nepokoj hodin [Disturbance of the Hours] (1984), was unusually mature, written in free verse, and contained the majority of the characteristics of Slíva’s poetry, which endeavours to look for an existential and transcendental dimension, principally through a very individual experience of time: time is the “disturbance of the hours”, which leads the poet to believe that “to write poetry means / to attempt a new language / of the blood.” A turning point in the development of Slíva’s poetry was the collection Volské oko (1997). Unlike the previous book, Černé písmo (1990), which was based around smaller poems written in pared-down verse and preserving a relatively significant degree of abstraction, here the author’s style is dominated by specific visualizations and a richness of poetic imagery. The poet finds sources of inspiration in the ancestral memory, in the community of the family, in biographies and in everyday situations in the lives of those close to him. These characteristics can also be found in the collection Tanec v pochované base (1998). Another significant feature of Slíva’s poetics is the symbolization and at times even monumentalization of everyday moments and events. The region of the poet’s birth is Opavsko and the main family town of Hradec. In his later collections (Na zdech stíny osik, 1999; Grave, 2001; Bubnování na sudy, 2002; Rodný hrob, 2004; the anthology Boudní muzika, 2005) there is a gradual deepening of the writer’s concept of time in a historical and mythical dimension as well as free verse mingling with classically formed verse. Slíva consciously attaches the names of Halas and Holan to Czech meditative poetry, mentioning them admiringly in his latest book: „Básník veškerých zdí! / Přes tu poslední ho v truhle přenesli / a vydali mluvě sousedů. / Zůstalo ticho, / vezděno v dům.“
