Za oknem Kovanda – Kovanda Jaroslav (2023)

An anthology of the poetic works of Jaroslav Kovanda. The book is designed to reflect Kovanda's poetic multilayeredness. It consists of thematic units that are nourished not only by so-called great and small history (intimate, family, collective, regional memory) but also represent the author's poetic translations, poetry for children, or his work for the magazine Psí víno, which he founded in the 1990s. All these genre transformations create an organic and authentic experience of a person of our age. Kovanda's poetic world very specifically grows from the connection of the serious and the humorous, from the poetics of everyday life, but also from a unique engagement with the legacy of surrealism, from constant experimentation with the imaginative, verbal, and formal – it is not only about reflective poems with rich imagery, but also about poems sensitively overheard or creative work with (family) diaries. The book is accompanied by Kovanda's paintings, which complete the whole of the author's idiosyncratic (Zlín and Archlebov) world, which he views with his characteristic exaggeration. One of the goals of this anthology is to place this poet, prose writer, and painter into the canon of Czech poetry, where his rightful place belongs. Few works of Czech poetry allow a person to pass through their allotted time...