Czech Prints - Owls

I am mindful that I have not blogged here for a while. I have been unable to get back to the Czech Republic for a year now because of Covid 19 restrictions, which makes blogging difficult. However I do have an extensive collection (over a 1000 items) of Czech prints, mostly ex libris or PFs, which could stimulate an interesting series of posts - either about the subject matter or about the artist. 

I am going start the series with a post about a subject dear to my heart - owls. When I was nearly three, my family moved house. My father took me exploring the garden, an event that has stayed with me to this day. The previous owner had kept owls in the old stables that sat at the bottom of the garden of our rather normal terraced house and Dad showed me the pellets. The experience is the subject of the poem that gave my newly published poetry collection its title. The poem appears at the bottom of this post. 

Ever since then I have had a love of owls and it seems that the Czechs have too, as owls feature in quite a few prints in the collection. Here are a few of my favourites: 

This is by Hanak, it's just one in a number of owl exlibris by the artist.

This by Plechaty

This by Rajlich

This is by Svolinsky

And this by Bugan. 

You will notice that this ex libris and the one by Hanak are for the same patron. You often find that patrons will commission different artists to create work on their favourite themes. Dr Pribys obviously loved owls. 

In case you are wondering the print at the top of this post is by Palenicek.

Here's the poem. If you are interested in buying the book, it is called Owl Unbound and is published by Indigo Dreams Publishing -  https://www.indigodreams.co.uk/zoe-brooks/4595048690. I have a number of copies to sell (signed if you want), just email me on zoe.brooks@googlemail.com to buy a copy. 

Owl Unbound

First we found the snake
a ball of coiled skin and muscle
in a pickling jar at the base of the hedge.
 
I followed my father up
the outside stair to the stable loft,
on one side the railway signal
without a track,
on the other a brick wall,
pocked as the moon,
that would crumble
like cheese in the rain
under the thud of my ball
and send it flying sideways
escaping me.
 
The tread creaked as my father entered
and I followed into the dim.
I looked around, but saw
only an empty perching post.
The owl had gone with its master.
 
At my father’s instruction
I held out my hands
as if ready to receive bread and wine,
but into my bowl of fingers
he dropped a pellet,
a galaxy of small bones and feathers
cocooned in fur.
 
That night I woke.
The moon shredded by clouds
hung over the stable roof
and an owl called unbound
from the cypress tree.

Remembering Hannah

I am in a strange state of mind. I have returned to finalize the house sale. Unless things get delayed, which they might, this is my last stay in my home. I am already saying goodbye to places I have loved for years, and not just places.

As I walked through the woods with Helena, and again when I went alone up to the woods above my house, I found myself thinking a lot about Hannah who introduced me to the Czech Republic and all things Czech. I owe this whole Czech adventure to Hannah. I realised as I walked with Helena, that the route was one that Hannah and I had followed on my first walk in a Czech forest several years before I bought my house. The same was true of the woods above my home, where Hannah gave me my first lesson in mushroom collecting. Over the brow of the hill the woods drop down to the road to Lake Olsina, where Hannah had her cottage.

Hannah's main home was in Cesky Krumlov. She moved three times in that town, so everywhere there are reminders of her. Although she died in April 2011, those memories never used to bother me. I always took comfort from them. But now I am glad the willows planted on the island she fought for have grown so large that they curtain the view of her last home, where my memories are most painful.

Selling my Czech home seems like letting her down. When she was dying she worried that the little colony of Brits that had grown up about her would break up. I told her: no offence but I didn't just buy the house because of her and wasn't planning to sell up after her death. She was relieved by this. It mattered a great deal to her that I bought the house as a place to write poetry. She loved my poetry and wanted to encourage it. The visit I made with her to Prague in 1990 was the inspiration behind my poem for voices Fool's Paradise.

I was chatting to her son the other day, who told that his mother would have been delighted that my poetry had suddenly blossomed and that at last I have a book of poetry accepted for publication next year with Indigo Dreams (more of that anon). I know too that Hannah would have understood the fact that I now need to be in UK to pursue my poetry dream. And yet...

Why I'm here. Part 2

I had two reasons when I bought my lovely derelict Czech farmhouse. The first as I said in my post of the 9th March was my friend Hannah Kodicek, the second was to create somewhere I could write.

The two reasons were not unconnected. Hannah always encouraged me to write. I think we really became close friends when she read a long poem I had written. She had known me as a manager, something that she respected but didn't love. At the time of the house purchase I was managing an inner-city regeneration programme working with the most disadvantaged. It was worthwhile work and I would have argued then that it allowed me to be creative in other ways than producing poetry that no one read. But Hannah begged to differ, she saw better than I did how one side of my personality was dominating the other, driving the poet and mystic underground. But when I came to visit her in the Czech Republic I found that side of me welling up in response to the landscape and history of Bohemia.

So I bit the bullet and bought the house. I said I wanted a hut in the forest, something that didn't need too much work, but my subconscious saboutaged that and I bought a huge farmhouse needing lots of work. I spent the next few years working hard at my job and pouring the money I earned into restoring the house, but still I did not write.

Things came to a head when one day I found myself crying in Hannah's study. It was soon apparent that I could not continue working in my wonderful but high pressured job. I said goodbye to my old career and came over to the Czech Republic and started to write. Not poetry but a children's novel. I loved the process. Even if my first book is now in a drawer in my desk never to see the light of day. The second one's there too. I am now on my fifth book. All of my books have been written in my Czech house.

Czech Train Journey

In previous posts I have talked about my pleasure at taking train journeys in the Czech Republic. But here is a post about another such journey and a fellow passenger.

Czech trains (well certainly the ones that run from Ceske Budejovice to Prague) tend to be somewhat old compared to British ones. This is no bad thing, as I rather feel that the Pendolino's aren't as good as the old trains - not enough luggage space and smelly loos. The Czech ones still have compartments, which caused my delighted two nieces to say it was a Harry Potter train, even if their journey began on a very unmagical platform in Budejovice. It is the nature of compartments is that you have a different relationship with your fellow passengers. This can be good and bad. If you are unlucky you will have difficulty escaping them without obviously moving away and so offending. For example recently I spent a three-hour journey in the confines of an overheated compartment with a woman with a bad cold, who didn't appear to know how to use a handkerchief. My fellow passengers and I looked on in horror, but said nothing - the Brits aren't the only ones to have a problem with challenging anti-social behaviour. In some cases your fellow travellers can be a joy, such as an elderly American doctor I met who, when her husband died, had set up a medical centre in Odessa much to the dismay of her children. If your fellow travellers are Czech, then the language barrier need not prevent your enjoyment - you can study Czech behaviour close up, you may find yourself answering questions about the UK or even sharing one of the picnics the Czechs usually bring on a journey (there are no buffet cars on our train).

But to my recent journey: I had settled into a compartment when an elderly man looked through the door at me and the empty compartment and asked if it was okay to join me. I waved at the empty seats and said "Ano, prosim". As a point of note, this is normal practice on Czech trains. To ask, without knowing Czech, it is sufficient to look in, catch the eyes of the other passengers, look round the compartment and say "Prosim?" The old man shuffled unsteadily to his seat, took off his coat, put it and his walking stick on a hook and loaded his luggage on to the rack. He sat down next to the window and opposite me, closed his eyes and went to sleep. This allowed me to study my travelling companion, he was a tall man, with grey hair receding at the temples, his hands were large and covered with liver spots, his grey jumper was hand-knitted but clean, his coat a good quality one. My first impressions of the usual poor Czech pensioner had been perhaps mistaken. I was now struck by what a remarkable bone structure he had, his face did not look Czech to my eyes, in fact he reminded me of a British aristocrat. He had been incredibly handsome when young and still looked pretty impressive.

After a nap he woke up and started to look out of the window. His gaze was an intense one and he was clearly thinking, my presence was not just ignored but didn't seem to register with him. After a while he opened his leather briefcase and took out three tattered notebooks held together by a rubberband and removed one which still had blank pages. He started to write and despite a shaking hand his writing was firm and clear. Ever so often he would stop, look out of the window with his steel-grey eyes, think about what to write next and then return to his notebook. He filled two pages and altered only one word. He was writing poetry!

At Prague he put away the book, put on his coat and shakily started to leave. As is customary he wished me "Na shledanou" and I returned it. I very much regretted not being able to speak to him properly, but then I wonder whether he would have written so openly in front of me if he hadn't noticed the English language novel I had been reading.

The Plague Column

The many tourists that throng the Town Square in Cesky Krumlov often ignore the large column set to one side and surrounded by statues. They may sit on its steps and take photos of each other, some may even photograph the column, but most have no idea what it is and what it commemorates.

It is a plague column set up to remember a plague epidemic that hit the town in the early 1680's. At the top of the column stands the Virgin Mary and around it there are saints who traditionally offer protection against the plague. This was not the first time the town had devastated by the plague, the town had also experienced the terrible impact of the bubonic plague in 1585.

It reminds me of an early introduction to Czech culture I had back in 1982 before I met my Czech puppeteer friend. I picked up a book of poetry in a second-hand shop and started to read. It was Ewald Osers' translation of Jaroslav Seifert's book The Plague Column. I was enchanted and bought the book. At the time it was not officially published in communist Czechoslovakia and was only available in covert samizdat versions. The poem is a personal journey by an old man through Prague. What I love about it is the way it moves from the present to the past, from the general to the personal. The plague of the title is not simply the bubonic kind, but a comment on the political plague that Seifert's beloved country was enduring at the time. But this is far from a political commentary, but a personal love poem to that most beautiful of cities.

Seifert received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1985, he died a year later. He did not live to see the crowds filling Wenceslas Square first call for and then celebrate the end of the pestilence that was communism.

Seifert was a brave man and a true poet. The last lines of The Plague Column read:

But I make no excuse
I believe that seeking beautiful words
is better
than killing and murdering.

Stifter's Trail

On Sunday I decided to walk the Aldebert Stifter trail around the hills that circle Horni Plana. I had been meaning to do it for years, and never got round to it. The walk is only about 4.5 kilometres long and although there is a bit of a climb to get out of the town it is relatively easy going after that. It is a lovely walk and has some spectacular views.

Stifter is known as the poet of the Sumava and was born in the town. The path first takes you through the Stifter Park to a monument to the poet, from where the copper and bronze figure can look across Lake Lipno to the Sumava, crowned by Plechy the highest mountain in Czech Sumava. The trail then takes you around a natural amphitheatre with spectacular views including, if weather conditions allow, views of the Alps that form a blue shadow rising behind the darker green of the Sumava (as is in this photo). You pass Stifter's spruce and then further on Stifter's beech or rather you don't as in both cases all that remains are the stumps! And then descend in to the town again.

Cafe Slavia

Cafe Slavia is to be found on the bank of the Vltava opposite the National Theatre. On the evening of my first day in Czechoslovakia nearly 20 years ago Cafe Slavia was full of people.

Cafe Slavia had long been the favourite watering hole of Prague's intelligensia - Kafka and Kundera have been among its customers. And it was also a favourite of the former Czech dissident leader and now president Vaclav Havel. Cafe Slavia then in early 1990 was a centre for those who were planning and executing the transformation of the newly democratised country. The cafe's Art Deco leather bank seating, cherrywood and onyx had been allowed to tarnish under the communists and yet the place shone with an energy that was almost palpable.

My puppeteer friend and I joined a group of her friends sitting in animated conversation, into which she soon was drawn. I sat, watched and listened to the flurry of a language I did not understand. I drank a cup of dark, thick Czech coffee and soon was intoxicated. Without language I was thrown back on my other senses, all of which seemed heightened by the apparent absence of the one.

Language is very important to me, but it exists on three levels. The first is that of conversation, the run-of-the-day exchange, and I am good at that, good at making people feel at ease, good at communicating what I wish and hiding the rest. The second is that of academic exactitude and arguing the case; three years at Oxford had honed this side of my language to a dagger point. And the last is something deeper. My parents tell me that as a small child even before I could read or write I composed poetry. This last level of language has a habit of tripping me up, starting as it does not in words but in rhythm. It is powerful and heady and something I resist until I can resist no longer. But most of the time it is drowned out by the hubbub of daily life. Here in the Cafe Slavia, drunk with the electricity in the air, I found that the conversation around me, stripped of meaningful words but full of exciting rhythyms and cadences, rang deep in that third level. It resonated inside me and something flexed like a Golem still unformed in Vltava mud.

Afterwards as we walked along the river to catch a tram to where I was staying I asked my friend about the one word I had made out in the multitude of others that evening. It had seemed to appear in every sentence, been the answer to every question. She smiled "Possibly," she said, "It means possibly." On that cold night in the early days following the Velvet Revolution everything was possible.