Pavěk – Guziur Jakub

Anglist and Americanist Jakub Guziur (1978) is known as the author of essayistic studies dedicated to the works of Ezra Pound and Thomas S. Eliot. Together with Josef Jařab, he organized the monograph George Steiner and the Idea of Europe (2006). The composition of small lyrical forms in Pavěk is his first poetry collection. It bears the subtitle Essays, Dedications, and Excerpts from Reading. This fact alone indicates that it is not a classic poetic composition, nor a self-serving literary experiment, although Guziur's sentences and graphically treated texts are influenced, among other things, by American experimental poetry of the post-Pound era. The author strives to reach the very core of the word and the foundation of language in his texts. He shifts or sets in motion the rigid meanings of words, while allowing ample space for silence, reticence, cracks, or rifts in a geyser of metaphorical imagery. The poet strips words of their historical layers in the pursuit of the original meaning. The emphasis of his statement is placed on mythicity, on the ability to communicate even based on suggestive fragments, which we navigate back through sometimes impenetrable layers of civilization and linguistic convention.