“I live on the boundary of the outside and the inside.”

I’ve always believed that the best way to take the pulse of a bookstore is to check out the display on the front table. Instead of best-sellers, this bookstore featured Czech poets – a treat for someone like me who knows virtually nothing about the literary traditions of this country. Oxford scholar Kathryn Murphy observes the presence of symbolism, surrealism, the avant garde of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as folk tradition. There is a shared mistrust of the conventional markings of time and boundaries. Many of these poems feel haunted to me, and ready to glide off the page.

Hejda, Zbyněk. “A Dream.” Six Czech Poets, edited by Alexandra Büchler, Arc Publications, 2007, p. 35

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