Dana Podracká foto 3

Dana Podracká

9. 3. 1954
Banská Štiavnica
Genre:
essay, general fiction, literary science, literature, other, poetry, screenwriting, ya and children's books

About author

How well you learned to combine your observations of the body and soul with observations of how the bodies and souls relate to each other. You combine what you have seen, discovered or found with your predictions and prophesies.

 

Jozef Mihalkovič

Dana Podracká is one of Slovakia`s leading women poets, who works with a variety of forms from free verse paragraphs to prose poetry. Many of her poems in Lady of Her Own Muzot deal with a moment of consciousness, snapshots of perception, such as watching a child or lover asleep at night. Other poems explore more savage feelings and modes of being and reach deep into the psyche of a poem`s protagonist. In this way they echo the rites of passage Man has undergone and the best of her poems contain both the dimensions of myth and contemporary relationships. The Last Siesta of Adam and Eve manages within the space of sixteen lines to evoke a pastoral scene reminiscent of the Quattrocento, but then moves to bleaker less painterly exploration of what the possession of knowledge can imply both for the individual and for a relationship. The poem Woman, one of the best short lyrics in contemporary Slovak verse, digs rather more deeply into these concerns and links instincts from prehistory with the violence of giving birth.

 

James Sutherland-Smith

In her essays Dana Podracká crosses the borderline between the metaphorical and the rational. Her poetry revolves around the socio-cultural phenomenon of pain which she views as the fundamental energy of both emotional and rational cognition. Whereas in her essays she intellectualizes this foundation by showing - against the background of historical, social, psychological and cultural facts - that art is life itself and that pain cannot be extracted from it and if the "poor" man tries to do so, he will stay insensitive and uncaring like the proverbial Thomas.

 

Viktor Maťuga