Description:
Where Everyone Leaves, Never to Return is a captivating collection of poems in which Czech poet Bronislava Volková, a jongleur of contemporary verse, masterfully combines voice and nuance as she saunters through love, loss, mortality, and eternal life. With a sharp wit, her verses render playful catechisms of why "a loving God can make an unloving man " but they also dive deep into self-discovery, achieving, even if just for an instant, the hard-earned right to a "joyous spirit of inner being." Her work is a testament to her life lived in full--a diverse and all-encompassing experience.
Brief description:
Bronislava Volková a bilingual poet, semiotician, translator, collagist, essayist and Professor Emerita of Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, where she was a Director of the Czech Program at the Slavic Department for thirty years. She is a member of Czech and American PEN Club. She went into exile in 1974, taught at the Universities of Cologne and Marburg and subsequently at Harvard and University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Review Quotes: "Bronislava Volkova traipses her diverse poetic creations from place to place, from tongue to tongue, to survive. She is a magician of change. She pours sound and meaning between lake and mountain, and they rebound like chanting on a star. Hear the lyrical narration. Hear the profound emotion encased in the experience of the elegant survivor. Her words echo with wisdom and grace, her images stun through a photographer's sharp lens, and the poetic song never ceases."
- Willis Barnstone, Author of Stickball on 88th Street
"Verses of Bronislava Volkováaacute; are a universe of the soul. They are formable, creating a space where brevity and eternity coexist with metaphysics and a most realistic, genuine, and fully lived life. In order to write like this, a special gift is needed. The poet herself has to become a work of art. If we open, for example, a volume of Walt Whitman and then we turn right away to Bronislava Volková's verses, we will under-stand what contemporary poetry is. An extreme laconism and concentration of life. And at the same time an understatement. A density of speech, with air between the lines."
--Aleksandr Karpenko - Author of Wind of Wounds