Sylva Fischerova is a young poet, born in 1963. She is unmistakably a poet of her Czech, more precisely Moravian, homeland, though distinct from any of her contemporaries, of whatever generation. Nowhere are her Czech roots more apparent than in her poems of social comment and protest. Her eye has fixed on a special aspect of repression: the occupation of her country by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact armed forces in 1968. Poems such as 'Necessary', 'The Merriest Country in the World', 'Am I My Brother's Keeper?' and 'Give Me Ashes, Earth and My Dead' stand, and will stand, as classic expressions of that traumatic phase of Czechoslovak history. They have astrength of dramatic impact and a structural logic that one mightn't expect from the author so attached in other poems to fantasy and myth. -- Ian Milner
There are poets to whom a thought causes pain and there are poets in whom pain causes.thoughts. Sylva Fischerova belongs, of course, to the latter, and her thoughts are deeply poetic and feminine. She does not play at being a woman poet, she is one, and her poems reflect the atmosphere and conditions of her homeland. There is not a shade of self-display in her writing, only authentic inner landscapes which, with the development of her poetry, become more white or more black, but always with red or blood-stained metaphors appearing at times as cracks or splits leading somewhere near the bottom. -- Miroslav Holub
