With restraint and a refined feel for language, humour and playfulness, Jiří Dynka explores male ageing against the backdrop of the death of his mother.

Poetry

Dynka skilfully negotiates the territory of emotional candour and graphic accounts of the deterioration of the body, walking a fine line between gravity and levity. In the gaping maw of retirement, he finds room for a quiet, loving partnership but also for unflagging eros which can provide amusement (for oneself and others). His mother has died and the lyrical subject observes the effect this has on his world and life month after month in the period following her death. He monitors the impact of this momentous change over the course of a year, with the poetic records of these observations forming the main section of this sensorily rich collection. In a brief introductory conceptual section, he examines the plight of the poet in today’s Czechia. In addition, creative work is a recurring theme throughout the collection as a whole, with occasional glimmers of almost Zen-like advice from this eternally youthful master of poetry.

Jiří Dynka (1959) was born in Gottwaldov (now Zlín). He spent his childhood in Luhačovice and since 1989 has been permanently based in Prague, where he began working as a boiler attendant at the Strahov College dormitory in 1987. He was later employed at the Institute of Clinical and Experimental Medicine (IKEM) as a dispatcher. He retired in 2020. He has published eleven poetry collections. His poems have regularly been published in journals and anthologies and have also been dramatized (for radio, theatre and television). He has twice been nominated for the Magnesia Litera Award for Poetry.