Unscrupulous Mirror

The second collection by Petr Hruška, one of the Czech Republic’s leading contemporary poets, I Caught Sight of My Face is a first-person retelling of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. It is based on The First Voyage around the World, an account of the journey written over five hundred years ago by the Venetian scholar and explorer Antonio Pigafetta, one of the voyage’s few survivors.

As poetry readers, we don’t often come across poetry collections adorned with illustrations (by Jakub Špaňhel) and maps, beautifully executed in a hardback edition. Hruška’s UK publisher, Kurturalis, specialises in books on arts and visual culture, and we can only hope that this will help Hruška reach a wider audience.

I Caught Sight of My Face is a departure from Hruška’s first collection, Everything Indicates: Selected Poems (Blue Diode Press, 2023), a book preoccupied with the quotidian. Here, the cover notes remind us, Hruška employs the epic voice to reflect on the contemporary world and human behaviour. The title itself already hints at some kind of reckoning. Mirrors abound in this collection, with the first section titled ‘Parrots in Mirrors’. Both parrots and mirrors are recurring images in the book and have something in common: they reflect ourselves back to ourselves.

The sardonic humour we recognise from Hruška’s first collection is also present here. In statements such as ‘when someone turns fifty / they kill him / so that he doesn’t fret’ or ’until now they believed / they were the only ones in the world’, Hruška uses the customs ...