This poetry collection by the idiosyncratic doyen of Czech poetry is anything but old-fashioned.

Poetry

Pernambuco is one of the federal states of Brazil. Ivan Wernisch, a Czech poetry legend, is still on the scene 57 years on from his debut and is still convincing readers with the same vigour that there is life left in his poetic universe. The twelve-part poetry collection Pernambuco deploys the means of expression which have been part of the author’s poetic world from the beginning: Wernisch’s cosmos spans farce and melancholy, comedy and tragedy, gravity and parody, dream and reality, together with movement in time, space and language.

This poetry collection, with Wernisch’s characteristic imagery, fantasy and blending of the real with the fictitious, the tragic with the farcical, also contains prosaic fragments and miniatures.

Ivan Wernisch (1942) is a poet, writer, journalist, translator and hoaxer. He studied at the Ceramics Industry College in Karlovy Vary. He began publishing his poems in magazines while he was a student. Due to his involvement in the events of the Prague Spring in 1968, he was banned as an author during the harsh Normalisation period which followed and his works only came out in samizdat or in exile. His texts were set to music by the legendary underground band The Plastic People of the Universe. He has written more than 30 poetry collections. As an editor he has compiled several important anthologies of “forgotten, neglected and despised” poets. Ivan Wernisch has been awarded the Jaroslav Seifert Prize (1992), the State Prize for Literature (2012), the Magnesia Litera (2013) and the Franz Kafka Award (2018). His work has been translated into many languages including English, French and Polish. He himself translates from German, French, Italian, Flemish, Russian and Latin.