The Swing in the Middle of Chaos

Selected Poems

Sylva Fischerová author Stuart Friebert translator Sylva Fischerová translator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloodaxe Books Ltd

Published:27th Jan '10

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Swing in the Middle of Chaos cover

Sylva Fischerova is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, she writes poetry with a vivid imagination as well as historical reach, and was first published in English as a young poet by Bloodaxe in 1990. Her poetry moves in and out of historical events, with an understanding and loving eye on our frailties as well as our corruptive acts, against the backdrop of her commanding sense of space and time, and 'makes beauty from monsters'. Mixing semantic and sonorous sense, her poems come to life through metamorphosed moments, showing that nothing can be taken literally in a world 'endowed with sense and meaning'.

'The best translations are those that don't appear to be translations - these poems are stunning as poems - rippling with metaphor, spontaneous, terse but nuanced. Driven by a restless moral intelligence which never loses urgency, Fischerova's poems mix hope with irony, showing why the world makes us ache' - Dennis Schmitz

ISBN: 9781852248598

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

160 pages