Two Poems

by Stephan Delbos

The American poet Stephan Delbos, who first visited Prague in 2003, links the worlds of Czech and Anglophone literature through his life and work. For Delbos’s first book in Czech, we selected two of his substantial poems, “Walking to Břevnov” from his collection In Memory of Fire (2017), and “A Child’s Guide to Candor” from his collection Small Talk (2021). “Walking to Břevnov” portrays the end of a love affair between two characters, Singleton and Stranger, in which Prague has played a central role. In “A Child’s Guide to Candor,” the narrator confronts the Czech and American worlds, at times speaking to his infant son and at times meditating on a parent’s responsability in bequeathing speech. Concerns about contemporary events blend with the narrator’s admiration for the minute particulars of daily life, and with his memories of childhood and the lives and deaths of his relatives.

124 pages, Paperback

Published October 15, 2021

About the author

Stephan Delbos is the Poet Laureate of Plymouth, MA. His poetry, essays and translations have appeared internationally. He is the editor of From a Terrace in Prague: A Prague Poetry Anthology (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011). His play Chetty’s Lullaby, about the life of trumpet legend Chet Baker, was produced in San Francisco in 2014. His co-translation of The Absolute Gravedigger, by Czech poet Vítězslav Nezval, was awarded the PEN/Heim Translation grant in 2015 and was published by Twisted Spoon Press. Deaf Empire, his play about Czech composer Bedřich Smetana, was produced by the Prague Shakespeare Company in 2017. He is the author of the poetry chapbook In Memory of Fire (Cape Cod Poetry Review, 2017), and the poetry collections Light Reading (BlazeVOX, 2018) and Small Talk (Literární salon, 2019). He is a founding editor of B O D Y.