Spodoby

This Czech-language poetry collection by Dominik Brt treats poetry as something decorated by many things, but rarely by honesty. Brt writes with words rather than merely with feelings and emotions, demonstrating that knowledge means sitting down to work and earning even calluses in unexpected places. He searches for sources with devilish determination, while avoiding the crude descriptiveness that might make his underground poetry sour with the taste of Ostrava beer or ferment with Brno bohemianism. What matters more is what does not repeat: sobriety in a world where poetry boards trains not governed by timetables and where the current poetic generation has become independent of poetry. Brts verses for boys and girls guard the secrets of experience, diary-like initiations and observation. They carry no nameplates on doorbells, yet something dry and loveless cracks within them as he draws simplicity out of space.