Poetry
Denní služba
Miroslav Holub · 1958
Synopsis
Poems born of the hospital and the research laboratory: the poet, a physician, finds in the gestures of work, the instruments and the vocabulary of science a civil language for speaking of everyday life. The verse, unrhymed, prefers precision and reasoning to melody, and emotion arises from observation rather than song.
Context
The book appeared in 1958 with Československý spisovatel, in the series České básně, the year its author obtained his doctorate in sciences; until then he had published in journals poems of Stalinist inspiration, which he abandoned. With the following collections, he founded the current that Czech critics have called poetry of the everyday: the poet seeks there, in the hospital, the laboratory and the learned lexicon, a civil voice opposed to the rhetoric of socialist realism.
Who it is for
A collection of seventy-five pages, in unrhymed verse. The author's work is mostly translated into English, as selections of poems; no French translation of this collection.
Prizes and reception
The book with which its author enters poetry, and one of those that founded the poetry of the everyday of the fifties and sixties.