Včely vyrobené z tmy – Šuhájek Pavel (2024)

I fear being alone after death,' the author writes in the last text of this collection. It is one of the most powerful verses I have ever read. Pavel writes and thinks as a poet should: in images that are charged with emotions, not proclamations. I feel a spontaneity and relaxation in his speech that responds to the movement of life and the world. He knows how to wait for the key moment: he writes only after experiencing deep emotion, anger, or enlightenment. He is not afraid to record his inner voice at the moment of a head-on collision with reality. These poems are X-ray images of intense feelings and changing states of mind. In a visionary totality, they express a truth about the world that is more striking than any journalistic report. Rimbaud said that the poet is a seer, but it is possible that today this maxim sounds like a worn-out phrase. However, when I read the poems of Pavel Šuhájka, I feel that this 'state' or perhaps 'process' is visible in practice. His poems instantly bring me back to the awareness of the fundamental qualities that poetry should possess. To imagination and inner experience: 'the trolleybus fills / it increases / animal warmth / glows / advertising slogans and the spirits of still living people / on the grainy image.' (from the afterword by Jakub Řehák)