Hřebeny – Štolba Jan (2007)

The four-part poetry collection introduces a cosmic, objectifying, and sometimes even hymnic accent into the remarkable arc of the author's previous work. The earlier experimental character of Štolba's lyricism recedes into the background, allowing poetry to emerge in the foreground as a geyser of images and metaphors, uncontrived and uncalculated, sometimes breaking through the aesthetic canon of contemporary poetic production. The dominant motif of Hřebenů is uninterrupted movement, associated with the exploration of both lyrical and prosaic lands. The depicted reality takes on the character of an island reef in Štolba's texts, to which the poet seems to sail after a previous shipwreck in the sea of infinity. After surveying the shores, he proceeds inward, into the interior of the real and fictional island of existence. The vivid image of the bare and empty coastal landscape transforms and structures itself through the discovery of a labyrinthine city, penetrating its corners and sceneries. In this collection, the author actually reflects on Prague for the first time in his work as a peculiar, albeit somewhat bizarre place to live, as well as an impulse for further penetration from its center to the periphery, to that primordial cosmic space, which repeatedly returns in the individual numbers of the collection. The book is accompanied by...