Staré dobré časy jsou právě teď – Matoušek Jaromír (2012)

Some poetry collections carry readers to exotic lands where unspoken adventures tangle the heroine’s dark hair; others create the feeling of never having left a slightly irregular but all the more picturesque square in a peaceful small town. The adventures found there can be every bit as rich as journeys through the wider world, and Jaromír Matoušek’s new collection belongs to this latter kind. Compared with his poetic debut Her Life (2011), it is considerably more restrained in form and expression, as though the poet, satiated with journeys into verbal extremes, has settled, like the Rožmberks, in his beloved Bechyně. Unlike the last Rožmberk ruler, he is fortunately not forced to leave this magical place, and perhaps it has brought him the same calm that allows him to sketch a human story in all its nakedness and clothing within a small space. The chief inspiration and inhabitant of the houses around this little square is still a woman: mysterious yet readable, alluring yet sometimes unattractive, complicated enough to bring tears and sensually simple. She slips smoothly and painfully into the poet’s heart; the rest is left more to the imagination than to words, for he is not only passionate but also gallantly discreet. In the old general store, a girl blushes who decades later becomes the author’s grandmother; next door lives a young woman seeking the author’s therapeutic care; farther on is a doll who cuts off her braid in grief over her fiancé’s unhappy death while serving in the army. The poet peers into every little window and passageway, the only person not merely permitted but required to be a voyeur. He invites readers to travel around the perimeter of this poetic square in the footsteps of a man who knows and sees because he does not hurry.