A celebration of chance, unexpected discoveries, and spontaneous ideas in a thoughtfully composed collection of original poetry and visual art.

Art, Children’s and Young Adult, Poetry

Inspiration for the poetry collection Dictations was drawn from two sources: artist Andrea Tachezy created assemblages of miscellaneous found items, such as shards and metal fragments, dry leaves, boxes or stones, and added drawings to complete and enhance them. Poet Petr Borkovec’s attention was caught by an exercise book of dictations and spelling exercises belonging to an eight-year-old schoolchild from Polana in Poland, not far from the Ukrainian border, which is actually something he personally found in the house he used to live in. He was fascinated by the unexpected confrontation of distant, originally entirely unconnected things and words in both the images and the exercise book. His imagination was unleashed by visual and sound sensations, inviting experimentation and resulting in new avant-garde, even Dadaist, wordplay. Playful, mischievous, short and longer poems, rhymed or prose, contain allusions to tricky sentences in school grammar lessons and Astrid Lindgren’s The Six Bullerby Children series. All the poems have subtle links to a total of twenty three-dimensional collages, which are separately captioned to explain how the images were created. The book’s layout resembles a school exercise book—there are handwriting exercises inside the front cover and a piece of blue blotting paper, bearing a poem called Blotting Paper, has been inserted.

Age: 11+