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(1935)
Poet and translator

One of the authors who did not want to publish under the communist regime or were not permitted to. She never published her first poems, which are included in the collection Propadání (Falling Through, 1957). In 1968 she and her husband, writer Pavel Buksa (Karel Michal), emigrated. She spent almost 30 years abroad, living in Swiss and German exile. She began to write only in the late 1980’s, when her first husband died.

The first lady of contemporary Czech poetry.


Selected bibliography – poetry collections:

Zádušní básně za Pavla Buksu (Requiem for Pavel Buksa, 1993)
The late debut of an excellent poet. Her personal encounter with death and the persistent desire to “find out what actually happened and what it was all about” were the main impulses for the creation of this collection. It is a highly spiritual book about death, containing diary entries, short prose pieces, and records of dreams.

Review:
“Requiem for Pavel Buksa” contains poems about grief and the deep sorrow that covered one human life with its own silence filled with shame.”
(Pavel Švanda, epilogue to the book)

Awards:
Czech Literary Fund Award (1993)

Babí hodina (Old Women’s Hour, 1994, 1995)
Large poetic composition in three parts, in which the author attempts to unravel the mystery of death through a reflection on the fates of women whose lives have come to the verge of death. At first glance, the work seems to be of a similar conception to (Staré ženy Old Women) by František Halas: and indeed we can find many identical motifs, but Fischerová uses a form very different from Halas – a sequence of various images that rapidly change in space and time.

Review:
“The continuous and seemingly endless river of time flowing through the poems of Old Women’s Hour truly mesmerises by its characters, who change kaleidoscopically and are reincarnated in key life situations or at significant episodes of the story. This conception creates a space for ever new horizons and points of view that emerge persistently throughout the poems and fascinate all the more by their ability to unfold not in front of us, but within us.”
(Antonín Brousek, Literární noviny)

Jak pápěří (Like a Feather, 1995)
This work consists of four parts that are only subtly indicated by inserted illustrative photographs. And it is full of love, which penetrates everything like an ever-present and essential theme. The motifs of fading love which run through Old Women’s Hour are even stronger here. In this collection, Fischerová returns to several poems from the unpublished Falling Through.

Review:
“ …the unceasing presence of tragic love without illusions, uncompromisingly sketched by the whispering feather of our anxiety in these individual, evocative and specific silhouettes of memory.“
Vladimír Novotný, Literární noviny

Odrostlá blízkost (Grown Proximity, 1996)
The four sections of Viola Fischerová’s fourth collection of poems also contain subtly lyrical verse on the passage of time and death.

Review:
“It is almost inappropriate to try to comment laboriously on the works of excellent female poets like Viola Fischerová. As with the wind we can never catch, our purpose-built interpretation will always be far behind the lyrical poem.”
(Jiří Peňás, Literární noviny)

Divoká dráha domovů (Wild Track of Homes, 1998)
These fragile, short confessions are unrelenting because of their conflicting images, the modest manner of locution and the expressiveness of silence.

Review:
“In terms of expression, Fischerová is essentially a purist. She does not try for either self-expression or the expression of content; rather, she seeks to touch, to achieve that quiet, sometimes scarcely audible resonance not of the bell-metal but of the isolated bell-clapper. She is concerned with purifying articulation so as to describe the essence of events in the most austere form. (…) With all her might Fischerová protects the intimate relationship she has with her own existence and the existence of others, and clarifies it in a concentrated way. From a concrete experience, which sometimes takes on the form of a report, the meaning of the verse arches upwards, to find support and culminate in transcendence. That is why the reader can breathe so freely within this verse.”
(Pavel Švanda, Literární noviny)

Matečná samota, (Mother Solitude, 2002)
A collection of poems about growing old. It is a confession about the shape of one´s past penetrating into old age, the form and image of love it holds and even about the things –mother things, crystallising things.

Awards:
Nomination for the Magnesia Litera Award 2003, poetry category

Review:
“This poet has a great gift for transforming the entirely personal images of her concrete experience into something that seems to be generally known and understood but also intimate at the same time. She panders, however, to nothing, and remains stubbornly original and true to herself, with only prompted sharp fragments reaching beyond the horizon of her subjective lyric declaration.”
(Dora Kaprálová, MF Dnes)

Nyní, (Now, 2004)
This collection contains nearly sixty brand new poems in which the author gives voice in particular to her exceptional feeling for a poetic shortcut, connotative terseness and the multi-layered character of her poetic communication.

Awards:
Nomination for the Magnesia Litera Award 2005, poetry category

Rights for Selected Poetry by Viola Fischerová sold to:
Bassarai, Spain
Atut, Poland

Notes:
Samples from the poetry of Viola Fischerová have been translated into English, German, French and Spanish and published in magazines as well as in anthologies of Czech literature world-wide. The collection Matečná samota (Mother Solitude) has been translated into Polish (by Dorota Dobrew) and this translation received an honorary award in a translators’ contest at the 2003 Warsaw International Book Fair; it has not yet been published in this language.
Excerpts from translations can be obtained from the Petrov publishing house upon request.



Zádušní básně za Pavla Buksu / Poems of Mourning for Pavel Buksa


Babí hodina / Old Woman´s Hour


Odrostlá blízkost / Closeness Grown Old


Divoká dráha domovů / Wild Track of Homes


Matečná samota / Maternal Solitude


Nyní / Now