Thanksgiving deserts

Pavel Rejchrt's extensive literary work, his poetic, prose and essayistic titles, published only after 1990, is now enriched by another publication with the eloquent title Pustinami k Thanksgiving. It presents a thoughtfully composed cycle of poems and prose, some of which were originally written in the 1970s, but mostly more recently, mostly during 2018. Some of the older texts have been extensively edited or reworked for the forthcoming edition, but the book as a whole is a remarkable showcase for Rejchrt's new poetic and prose output in particular.

In accordance with the artist's lifelong aesthetic and philosophical orientation, the individual prose and verse works in this publication can be described as existential, i.e. written in the spirit of modern Christian, especially evangelical post-existentialism. However, the pressing issue of the present human situation enters many of them in a persistent and pleading way: as the author painfully perceived and experienced it, wishing it were not so. In many of the stories and poetic confessions, the equally eruptive and self-questioning world of the 1960s, a period in which Pavel Rejchrt as a writer (at first mainly an artist) matured and shaped his conception of artistic creation and religious faith, also comes to life again. Through a reflection on today's "post-truth" society, these texts also evoke, in various forms, a moral unease over the imaginary and unthinkable civilisational and mental wastelands in which the author believes we live helplessly and, in turn, live no less helplessly. Rejchrt's ageless confessional speeches insistently call for the essential purification of our minds, but they are, whether older or newer, always first and foremost fiction and poetic speeches of the writer and thinker. Speeches that aim at timeless thanksgiving and thanksgiving.