Poetry

Description from the English edition:

Pavel Šrut’s fractured lyrics are often themselves fractured parables about the individual’s relation to authority, whether that authority be the state, a colonizing power, the court of public oppinion, a dubious beloved, or history itself. In some of his poems, the wives of Great Men have the last, often hilarious, word on their husbands’ accomplishments, and in others a poor Everyman schmuck Novak–the Czech equivalent of Smith, though even more suggestive of ordinariness–bumps his head, again and again, on the iron question mark at the heart of existence.

Praise

“Šrut’s poems grapple with irrefutable turning points, moments when the familiar dissolves. These poems […] dance between darling adoration of life’s mysteries and expressions of quotidian detail. At the same time, Šrut’s deceptively simple images capture abstract concepts in vivid parables.”

—Stephan Delbos, AGNI