Arc Publications

Six Slovak Poets is the sixth volume in a series of bilingual anthologies of contemporary verse from Europe and beyond and features the work of poets of an older generation who started publishing in the 1960s. They lived through the difficult times that followed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, through the political, social and cultural transformation of the past twenty years since the fall of the communist regime in 1989, and through the division of the country in 1993 which gave birth to today's Slovak Republic. The work of these poets continues the experimentation with form and language of the pre-war Central European avant-garde, with added elements of myth, legend, folk tales, and references to religion and the natural world. Also integral to their work are philosophical reflection and exploration of the moral issues raised by the circumstances in which they worked. The result is a densely woven, polythematic free verse representative of the poetics of a generation that has been central to Slovak literary life for four decades, a generation whose approach to poetry younger writers who have subsequently entered the literary scene are still developing or reacting against. Parallel-text: Slovak / English

At the Skin Resort is a collection poetry set in Central and Eastern Europe and written in the years following the revolutions of 1989. The poet, James Sutherland-Smith went there to work early in 1989 and found himself caught up in th events of that time. He has settled in Slovakia which is a country in the heart of the Slavonic nations and subject to the various influences and pressures from north, south,east and west. It is a place of astonishing variety interms of culture, history and nature and is exemplary for recent and more ancient history. Sutherland-Smith's poems are not,however, travel poems, but poems whose significance communicates beyond their locale.