Swing in the Middle of Chaos

Sylva Fischerová was born in 1963 in Prague. She grew up in the Moravian town of Olomouc as a daughter of non-Marxist philosopher whose works were banished under communist rule. She returned to Prague to study philosophy and physics, and later Greek and Latin, at Charles University where she now teaches ancient Greek literature and philosophy. She has published six volumes of poems in Czech, and her poetry has been translated and published in numerous languages. An earlier selection of her poems, The Tremor of Racehorses, translated by Ian and Jarmila Milner, was published by Bloodaxe in 1990. She recently began to write prose, and a book of her stories Miracle, as well as a book for children, appeared in 2005. The Swing in the Middle of Chaos: Selected Poems, co-translated with Stuart Friebert, was published by Bloodaxe in 2010.

'The best translations are those that don't appear to be translations - these poems are stunning as poems - rippling with metaphor, spontaneous, terse but nuanced. Driven by a restless moral intelligence which never loses urgency, Fischerova's poems mix hope with irony, showing why the world makes us ache' - Dennis Schmitz