Gravitation

Milan Děžinský’s poems probe what lives in the shadows. They’re alert to the echoes and whispers of history, to what’s heard through walls, and to secrets forests keep. They speculate about the wonder of a woman’s tongue, peer into the composition of matter, question who is prey and who is predator. And perhaps most importantly, these poems are attentive to every kind of messenger: injured animals, apparitions, ‘the mathematical beauty of frost,’ a wall containing a still-trembling ‘tear of builder’s sweat.’ Deep and dark as chasms, sometimes wry, sometimes chilling, they demand repeated readings. Dear translator, can we please have some more?

-- Amy Gerstler, author of Is This My Final Form?

Milan Děžinský’s poems embrace immediacy. They arrive on the page as if from a vast silence. Aware of the cost of history, claiming no place in the world, Děžinský inhabits contingency: ‘I gaze into the sun and I’m already someone else.’ Then a poem will slip, who-me, into the infinite, without a trace of rhetoric, with no comment on the distance traveled: ‘We look into the fire / as if again witnessing / the creation of the world.’ Searching for a language freed of hierarchies, intimacy without a template, Děžinský’s vision is radically open. You might think of James Baldwin’s insight that ‘The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.’ In an age that bows to absolutes, Gravitation is beautifully autonomous, intuitive, human.

-- D. Nurkse, author of A Country of Strangers: New and Selected P