Paralelní životy – Petrák Bořivoj (2025)

Bořivoj Petrák's second collection contains 58 poems, accompanied by watercolors by the academic painter Ivan Komárek. The author writes about his poetry collection:
"Sometimes it seems that poetry is a diary of its creator and that each poem contains a single specific experience of the author. This is often not true. The classic school question 'What did the poet mean?' often cannot be answered clearly. Sometimes the author himself does not know exactly. The words are arranged, and he feels that they are arranged correctly. In a poem, very personal and very general realities often coexist, intertwining, and sometimes it is difficult to separate them. It is a statement about a situation that the author has experienced himself or that has resonated with him so significantly that he has emotionally adopted it. The time factor is often uncertain – the record may be written immediately or with a significant time lag. Sometimes a poem needs to mature... and occasionally, hidden under layers of time, it takes a long time to ripen.
Just as individual tracks are arranged on a record, the poetry collection is assembled. The poems connect with each other and form a common whole. And when they are not lined up one after the other, they can be arranged in parallel and then create a common surface. So it is with our lives. They connect with each other, but with their uniqueness and a dose of solitude...