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Martin Stöhr’s third poetry collection, Přechodná bydliště, begins with a quote from the lyrics of the Canadian poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen: “The poet returned my soul which I had lost while praying.” What, after those words, is there to expect from the readers’ previous experiences with Stöhr’s first two collections, the debut Teď noci, and three years later, Hodina Hora: less theatrical and bombastic devotion to God, more inspired poetry? Fewer echoes, quotations and plagiarisms, more intimacy? Fewer stylised expressions, more spontaneous melodies? All of these. And added to this: with Ivan Blatný and his earlier collection Melancholické procházky as well as his later texts from the book Stará bydliště. In his latest collection Martin Stöhr has surprisingly changed his poetics – as though he breathed out and the poems relaxed: his matter-of-fact, simple lyrical reflections now flow with certainty, with a peaceful, expressive nonchalance, powered by an inner rhythm and the presentiment of a private secret – with no occasional naivety or naive rhymes (“hvězdy jsou jak / sedmikrásky nad brnem / dobou noc / dobrý den”) standing out from the compositions: the comic has left and moved towards authenticity. The reader begins to believe Stöhr’s poems: he is close to the quiet and self-enclosed landscape which the poet inhabits, regularly pounding “the mills of calming words” and above them the eternal silver moon – but not a Morgenstern moon of linguistic games, but the moon of romantics to which belongs a poeticised or rather late-poetic melancholy and reminiscence (similar to the early, but more to the later Blatný), the same as heightened senses, moments in which the poet glorifies his femme fatale. Stöhr’s verses unify an autumn mood: on the one hand nostalgia from the awareness of people’s finality and regret over that which passes (“lasička stesku pádí / přes dvůr”) and for that which remains “an irreparable emptiness”, on the other hand, against the flow, a quiet joy, simply magical and spontaneous through “I see autumn”, as the author writes, and elsewhere – “smoke like honey”. Přechodná bydliště is set firmly in space and in time, accentuating traditions and order, they are archaistic and conservative, the postmodern tendency is completely missing in the expression and themes. Despite the fact that Stöhr’s world is often close to the poetics of Petr Hruška, and elsewhere to the poetics of Wernisch, especially in its meditative, absurd and nonsense aspects, it seems to us that the poet is increasingly remaining within himself. He doesn’t introduce long words and eternal questions into his texts, it is enough for him to look for “so many small / lovely things” and then turn the banal into the magical – the mark of a true poet.

En français Martin STÖHR