Smích ze snu – Stöhr Martin (2012)

Stöhr's fourth collection — civil, unforced poems, yet also enchanted, melancholic, and playfully ironic. Longing and laughter. The feelings we experience when Sunday ends, the fair departs, in short, 'the season is over.' Stöhr can easily and naturally sketch Lhoták-style still lifes in a small space: 'it quietly cracks in the keel of the evening boat / peace explodes over the courts and shadows / the bell towers of factories / the machinery of churches / the path, the fence, the sewer, and daisies.' With a lightly ironized nostalgia, he recalls his childhood, cautiously (so that the lyricism does not sound overly lyrical), yet all the more credibly and convincingly pays tribute to his loved ones. It is as if a struggle unfolds here between heightened perception on one side and Wernisch's playful detachment on the other. How much simple enchantment and feeling can be admitted, how much erudition, and when is it necessary to look at it all from the outside, not believe it, smile, and dismiss one's 'findings'? The struggle ends remarkably indecisively; although the individual texts differ in atmosphere and imagery, the result is a cohesive and impressive collection.