Zboží – Rajchman Pavel (2020)

Along with the previous two poetry collections published by Triáda—Otherwise, and Elsewhere (2015) and Days from the Bottom (2017)—Goods (2020) forms a loose yet composed trilogy in its poetics and choice of themes. The fifty-one poems in the collection are organized into four sections, each further divided after the introductory poem into four "mini-mottos" reading: "climatized," "monitored," "not updated," and "do not forward." In the collection Goods, the author demonstrates his expressive precision, with which he is able to capture the duality, uncertainty, misery, and paradoxes accompanying the human experience, in which "something ... suddenly ... freezes and falls / it shatters and injures," yet immediately when "today is mixed with a piece of summer, / in the heat of that withering summer / the wounds are healed." As the title of the collection Goods suggests, the themes arise from the sphere of "consumability," accompanying a prosperous society. The title also echoes the phrase "By the grace of God..." It is a capability that poetry opens up: to see tenderness, the "smile of a mother," which "crushes / the slightest sign of melancholy between her teeth," and to transform the "trembling, plump rounded belly of a father" into a "paperweight for song."