Ivan Wernisch: The Story of a Raindrop I–III

Volume I (1958–1985) Volume II (1985–1994) Volume III (1996–2009)

Gema Art publishing house has published the most extensive three-volume selection of Ivan Wernisch’s work to date, edited by Jan Šulc and featuring beautiful graphic design by Robert V. Novák.

“Here, Ivan Wernisch moves through his entire body of work to date with admirable ease, warmth and a sense of responsibility, selecting and presenting to readers something new from his own work. Indeed, this compositional principle could already be observed in Wernisch’s writing from the late 1960s onwards. A published poem was never, for him, a discarded and ticked-off item in his own creative history, but something continually alive and unfinished, something that radiates a different energy each day and can be taken up again and placed within a newly created context.” (Quoted from Jan Šulc’s introduction.)

In this selection, Wernisch, entirely unconstrained by any rules or order, has arranged his poems into a three-volume “novel”. Alongside Wernisch’s sarcastic as well as serious verses, the work also offers readers a narrative that flows freely from the first volume to the third, allowing them to fully savour the virtually inexhaustible wellspring of Wernisch’s imagination.

An interview with Ivan Wernisch in Hospodářské noviny.