Spatřil jsem svou tvář – Hruška Petr (2022)

A surprising collection from a poet whose verses can be reliably recognized in the polyphony of Czech poetry. On September 8, 1522, after an exhausting three-year voyage, the 'last wretched ship of the great Magalhães fleet / overloaded with nails, / eighteen men / and a message, / that the Earth has no edges, and thus no rest' arrived in Seville, Spain. Exactly five hundred years later, on September 8, 2022, Hruška's book is released, partially inspired by the first circumnavigation of the globe. In forty poems and one longer piece, a grand yet foolish, painfully tragicomic image of a fictional voyage is captured. The author's ship is both exploratory and conquering, reminiscent of the famous medieval ship of fools, stripped of direction and meaning. It becomes a universal metaphor for human endeavor in its unabashed cruelty, a grotesque effort to discover the world and a struggle to salvage at least the remnants of one's dignity. We find a ship that 'has been heading forward for so long, / that everything began to resemble something.' We encounter a gripping work in which the words 'forward' and 'return' continually tremble with their meaning. The poems, in which Hruška's typical down-to-earth style does not hinder heightened fantasy, are complemented by reproductions of paintings by Jakub Špaňhel.