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“UNPOETICAL” POETRY OF PETR HRUSKA

Martin Pilar

Abstract

Petr Hruska (born 1964) is a poet and literary historian from Ostrava. This post-industrial city used to be famous for its black coal mines and steel factories. At the time of the industrial boom, Ostrava started to be a “melting pot” of nations living in this part of Central Europe – the Czechs, Poles, Germans from Silesia, Austrians, Jews, and Slovaks. No wonder, then, that the cultural life of this region differs from that in traditional centres of Czech culture like Prague or Brno. Nevertheless, Hruska’s collections of poems have been awarded the most prestigious Czech literary prizes and are more and more often translated into foreign languages. The following essay is based on the book of Hruska’s selected poems, translated at the Harvard University and published in Britain (Everything Indicates, 2023). After the analyses of Hruska’s main themes and means of their verbal expression, attention must be paid to how he deals with the interplay between the history of individuals and families versus broader social and political contexts. Of course, describing this tension is quite common among artists and experts in social sciences. However, Hruska’s literary texts are in many aspects unconventional because his way of thinking and expression does not follow the typical stylistic norms of both classical and modernist poetry. The methodology of comparative literary studies must be used here because, without it, the international success of the author from a cultural periphery cannot be adequately understood. In his early poems, Hruska was a representative of so-called everyday poetry settled in a small universe of his family and friends. Nevertheless, in his newest collection, I Caught Sight of My Face (Spatril jsem svou tvar, 2022), he takes part in Magellan’s voyage around the world, reflecting on the transient and the eternal aspects of human life. It seems that there is no significant difference between intimate and social history, and Hruska can express it in simple sentences with no complicated metaphors. In the chaos of the postmodern world, this kind of writing can be attractive even for readers who are not fond of traditional poetry.

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