Wernisch, an important figure on the chessboard of Czech poetry of the last half-century and whose background lies in the traditions of Expressionism and Dadaism, is an author for whom both the comic and the tragic are typical. In his new book he mixes poetry with prose and dramatic miniatures, and places juvenilia – written in the late 50s – side by side with his current texts. Ivan Wernisch (1942) has always belonged to that group of ambiguous and hard to define authors – masters of compositional tricks, genre change and stylisation; his favourite creative techniques are play and mystification. He proves the above not only in his Nikam collection but also in Příběh dešťové kapky (2010), his three-volume summary of his life’s work, containing more than a thousand pages.