A cabinet of curiosities. A collection of invitations to imaginary worlds. Immersive poems which have to be actively delved into and completed. What in fact are we reading? Poetry which above all else wants to pose this very question.

Poetry

Ivan Wernisch’s body of work ranks among the most important in postwar Czech poetry and is continually being developed and enriched by the author with remarkable persistence and passion. This is also the case when the poet reaches for one of his favourite creative techniques – grouping together previously published poems into new contexts and relationships, where they suddenly take on a new meaning. And this also applies to The Wooden Cake Hire Shop. As in Wernisch’s previous collections, it is less about what is being referred to in the poem and more about the language itself, its power to win over the reader and take them to worlds created solely from words.

When creating these charmingly archaic microcosms, Wernisch draws on his exceptional ability to evoke moods and sensory experiences. The texts cover a wide range of genres, from lyrical miniatures to old-time ditties, to poems in prose that often have the form of an unreliably narrated farcical micro-story – or even more frequently the fragment of one – whose mysterious incompletion challenges the reader to creatively finish it, and gradually draws them into his vortex of imagination. Playing with the reader is in fact the essence of this poetry.

Ivan Wernisch (1942) is a poet, writer, journalist and translator. 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.