Co teď a co potom – Hons Václav (2025)

The collection What Now and What After is already the twenty-fourth poetry collection by Václav Hons (*1938), which the author has published in the Radix publishing house over the course of just a few years. Besides the poem Water Music (2015), dedicated to the personality of George Frideric Handel, the poet expresses in all these collections his feelings from the past life in lyrical form, with reminiscences of his youth, occasional current, sometimes even political connotations, with many metaphors, and a clear relationship to art, especially music.

Václav Hons has been dedicated to poetry for over 60 years; his first collection What Is Before the Eyes, encompassing verses from 1959-1960, was published in 1962. However, since the late 1950s, he has contributed to various cultural and literary periodicals (Literární noviny, Tvář, Plamen, Host do domu, etc.). His bibliography includes over 50 items, including older collections such as The Walker, Black Graces, Rain Under the Hat, and Liquefied Wings.

In addition to translating poetry from Bulgarian and German, he has also written several hundred song lyrics, especially chansons, for artists such as Karel Gott, Hana Zagorová, Věra Špinarová, Vítězslav Vávra, and others. The most famous are probably Naughty Sneakers for Lucie Bílá. In 2018, he received an award for his...