A Church for Smokers
Prague Poems
Original title: Kostel pro kuřáky. Pražské básně
Publisher: Novela bohemica, Prague, 2019
ISBN: 978-80-88322-02-3
104 pages
Poetry
bilingual edition
To the many images of Prague, the author adds in this highly personal anthology other images: Prague like a „giant barrel of rotgut diluted by the Vltava“, a place where even „history phosphoresces“. And like Franz Kafka, well she knows how „this mother has sharp claws“.
„Here the café‘s a church for smokers!“ we read in one of the poems in this collection. Sylva Fischerová writes about the city of her birth, and her hometown since beginning her university studies. In several of the poems, the city is not even named, although it is unmistakeably Prague and Prague‘s genius loci.
In Part One we travel mostly through Prague in the 1980s feeling the bizarre atmosphere of those years; and in Part Two, through Prague of recent days and the here and now, always however experienced personally from within both the context of history and one‘s own life story.
