Ovace nevlídnosti – Lauerová Sylva (2012)

Ode to Unfriendliness – a combination of two random words? Does the controversial Czech writer and poet pay tribute to unfriendliness in her new poetry collection? Publicly and enthusiastically? Or is she provoking again, trying to draw the reader into her bleak and painful images just to help them find beauty in the moment in the simplest things, like the flight of birds? Or is unfriendliness itself paying tribute to us? For our mistakes and aimless wandering? Is it even possible to celebrate a gloomy and unwelcoming state... not just of our minds? Perhaps only as a warning that it will engulf us if we allow it. Poet and writer Sylva Lauerová stubbornly maintains her extreme creative polarity, and after the release of the commercially successful novel Jumaroro (summer of 2011), she once again retreats into the shell of her poetic intimacy in the collection Ode to Unfriendliness. This second standalone collection from this controversial figure of the Czech literary scene, a Brno native partly living abroad, is a selection of poetry from the years 2010 to 2012. The very paradoxical title Ode to Unfriendliness hints at the direction and content of the verses, which carry painful and depressive themes. Lauerová deliberately overlooks superficial worldly themes in her poems; the object of her poetry becomes the human soul...