As an eighteen-year old youth, Ivan Kupec was already a member of the surrealist group of poets, a major literary movement in the Forties. He applied the surrealist poetics in his first book,
Changing the Masks According to the Stars that he published under his original name, Ivan Kunoš. The work is characterised by thematic diversity, loose imagery, and the free thought association.
The collection
Shell confirms the poetic talent of Kupec. It is a thematically diverse book, there are love poems, verses searching the connections between the past and the present, reflective texts that analyse the position and role of man in history.
Kupec called the long poem
Mahonai, "a saga for a female voice".
The main theme of the work is the confrontation between the world after a possible nuclear catastrophe and the world of love represented by the lyrical heroine Mahonai. She is the symbol of femininity, fertility, and vitality. Here, he used
a manner of writing that he appropriated as a surrealist, including the free association of the poetic images.
The next collection
Taking off the Anger is quite remarkable as a poet's testimonial of his own inner struggle with the negative phenomena of existence, of his coming to terms with the period in which he has to live, and with social and personal problems. His attitude towards the social dimension of man is present mainly in those poems where Kupec touches the political repression of the Fifties. This work confirmed that Ivan Kupec is an author of complex and widely composed metaphor that doesn't easily yield to the reader.
An Hour with an Angel includes only seventeen poems and therefore it is thematically more compact, but even here there is an intertwining of the individual and the social. The author expresses here an important message about the fate of the civilisation (for example in his
Ode to the Flushing Civilisation).
As mentioned in his biography, after the 1968 occupation of Czechoslovakia Kupec was not allowed to publish his own work.
He returned to the literature at the beginning of the Eighties when the book
New Metamorphoses (selected old and new poems)was published. The culmination of his work is doubtless represented by the collections
Shadow Play (1988) and
The Book of Shadows (1990). These works are closely related, as suggested by the titles. The poetic cycle
The Book of Shadows confirms the originality of Kupec's poetics, as well as his reflective, philosophical treatment of texts. He is interested in everything between the origin and dissolution, life and death, but also in the departure from life, death, and in the secret of non-existence. He speaks of the eternal problems of man such as loneliness, loss of love, loss of the loved one, depressing feeling of the passing of time, old age, and fear of dying. The unity of life and death, their inseparable character, is evident in this collection. Most of the poems are filled with sadness, melancholy, pain, and even agony. The author pays attention to the fateful imprisonment of humankind by history, though he captures it with a dose of irony. Such attitude corresponds to the generally sceptical and even pessimistic understanding of existence based on the author's personal losses.
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