Martin Stöhr

Applied Lyricism

Užitá lyrika Užitá lyrika
Užitá lyrika
Host, 2020, 68 pp
9788027503025

“If it is still possible to talk about beauty in connection with poetry, then I believe that this collection is not only Stöhr’s most beautiful, but it ranks among the most sensitive, most impressive and most intensely poetic Czech verse of the past twenty years.”
— Czech Radio, Vltava

“Stöhr’s sixth collection so far is a living paradox. The title and the graphic design alone! So minimalist, prosaic and economical. And inside? It’s true that there are not many poems and most of them aren’t particularly long, and yet it is a book replete with unbelievable vividness, fertile imagination and refined lyricism.”
— Tvar

Foreign rights:
Dana Blatná Literary Agency
http://www.dbagency.cz
blatna@dbagency.cz

A nostalgic, wistful collection about life, love and the city of Brno.

Poetry

Martin Stöhr is a prominent Czech poet and his new book would appear to have been written for people of his generation, for his family, for Brno, but primarily for himself. These are beautiful memoranda, images from times slipping into the past, when “the old world silently falls”, from childhood, youth and approaching old age, which he observes and portrays anew in coloured ink – no reason to despair, instead there is room for uncovering gold in the form of securing a simple love for a complex city. The colour emerges from the linguistic wealth, from the variety of the palette from which it is drawn, the subtle feeling for an image, clean cuts, a strongly evoked atmosphere and its sharp fractures. The book is imbued with a strange wistful quality, a nostalgia when observing the change and permanence of a city and our former selves, the feeling of futility and uselessness at any attempts at art, but which is indispensable nevertheless.

 

Martin Stöhr (1970) is a poet and journalist who started off in the wider stream of spiritual poetry. He graduated from Palacký University’s Faculty of Education in Olomouc. Applied Lyricism, published in 2020, is his sixth book of poetry. His poems have been published in a number of Czech anthologies, in journals in Slovakia, and in translation in Germany, Poland, Slovenia and Bulgaria. He is an editor for the Host magazine and publishing house. He lives in Brno.


“If it is still possible to talk about beauty in connection with poetry, then I believe that this collection is not only Stöhr’s most beautiful, but it ranks among the most sensitive, most impressive and most intensely poetic Czech verse of the past twenty years.”
— Czech Radio, Vltava

“Stöhr’s sixth collection so far is a living paradox. The title and the graphic design alone! So minimalist, prosaic and economical. And inside? It’s true that there are not many poems and most of them aren’t particularly long, and yet it is a book replete with unbelievable vividness, fertile imagination and refined lyricism.”
— Tvar

Užitá lyrika
Host, 2020, 68 pp
9788027503025
Foreign rights:
Dana Blatná Literary Agency
http://www.dbagency.cz
blatna@dbagency.cz