Family chronicles, which simultaneously work as a popular alternative to historical compendia because the horizontal of great history intersects in time with the vertical of specific characters, places, relationships and stories, are among the most interesting items of authors’ bibliographies. This is also true for the first novel of poet and artist, Jaroslav Kovanda (1941). However, this history, covering more than a hundred years of the Fila family living in the Zlín region, is not a traditional chronological description of lives and times. Rather, it is as though the author, having spread his collection of material across the surface of a table, pieced his story together in a manner sometimes deliberate and sometimes accidental. The result, aided by the use of Moravian dialect, is both poetic and experimental. Kovanda, who has published fifteen books, was responsible for founding, and for many years editing, Psí víno , a magazine for contemporary poetry.