The forms of the living world in the stirring rhythm of lyrical and prose verse.

Poetry

Pavel Kolmačka’s poetry collection, divided into five parts (The Life of the Body, Life during the Day and at Night, Life above the Crater, Life on the Border, The Forest), focuses in zones and cycles on what is repeated in the titles of the individual parts: life. The collection tends towards prose narration and uses the absurd headlines from the media world which reflect the state of contemporary society in a tragicomic manner, the professional debates of tradesmen, as well as diaries. Just as elegant are his lyrical poems which draw upon the parallel world of nature, plants, animals, ideas and desires, resulting in an uncontrollable rhythm of terrible and moving statements in the past, which rouse and carry the reader away.

Pavel Kolmačka (1962) is a poet, writer and translator. After graduating from the Technical University he worked as an assistant at the ČKD Polovodiče engineering company, and as a carer at an institute for the mentally handicapped and at a senior citizens’ home. He worked as a journalist at the Velehrad magazine. Later, he also studied the religion of archaic cultures of natural nations at Masaryk University’s Faculty of Arts in Brno. Since 1993 he has worked as a translator. He is the author of five poetry books. For Kolmačka, poetry is a characteristically straightforward, civilized expression of liberation and family intimacy, through whose gentle gauze sift social themes and internal anxiety. His poems have been translated into several languages.