Škrapové pole – Fridrich Radek (2024)

The poet (born 1968), educator, translator, publicist, and winner of the Magnesia Litera award for poetry, as well as a core author of our publishing house, comes out with a new collection. It is composed of four sections: The one with the bird's head includes poems of so-called 'forest' and 'topographic' lyricism; Out of the corner of the eye consists of texts evoked by his own analog collages; According to are textual montages of extracted sentences from poetic, fictional, and theatrical works, written in the stillness of the COVID time; and finally, the section Uschi has ears summarizes texts inspired by German grammar manuals. The poet four times differently, but each time his own. Mysterious paths, snake dreams, murderous stories, bizarre images, hints of the grotesque, Sudeten slopes. Characteristic of Fridrich are rich chords of language and mere scraps of speech, with heroes like Uwe, Ulla, Udo, Ulrika, enchanted into strange melancholy. Something is being wounded here, something hurts here, and something is healing here. Poems like walking across the lava of a karst field.