Six Czech Poets

Arc New Voices from Europe and Beyond: 3 The third in a series of bilingual anthologies of European poetry and an introduction to the here-and-now of Czech poetry, this volume presents the work of six Czech poets who belong to very different generations. Zbynek Hejda and Viola Fischerova are part of the generation which was exiled by the totalitarian regime of pre-Velvet Revolution Czechoslovakia while Petr Borkovec, Katerrina Rudcenkova, Pavel Kolmacka and Petr Halmay represent the younger generation which started publishing in the late 1990s. All six poets are widely known and highly regarded in the Czech Republic but are unfamiliar to English-language readers, so this anthology is an excellent introduction to the cutting edge of Czech poetry. Six Czech Poets opens with the work of Zbynìk Hejda, widely recognised as one of the most important Czech poets since World War II. One can see why... It is haunting work built upon landscapes, some part of the surface of which gets scratched away, leaving a view, to paraphrase the author, right down to the bone, the death...Edinburgh Review Zbynek Hejda, Viola Fischerova, Petr Halmay, Pavel Kolmacka, Petr Borkovec and Katerrina Rudcenkova have all had collections of poetry published in the Czech Republic and abroad. Hejda and Fischerova are two of the great names in late twentieth-century Czech poetry, much revered in their native land; while Borkovec and Rudcenkova are rising stars of the twenty-first century and more widely known.