Jozef Urban

Jozef Urban also knows that the portrait of Dorian Urban is too restraining but he is not yet prepared to re-evaluate himself, to leave the shell of self-reflection created by himself and still alive, to the readers. In short, his fear is too deep. Brilliant use of verse, deliberate choice of the sonnet - all this is just a painkiller, a multi coloured smoke screen designed to cover his fear.

Jozef Urban entered Slovak poetry with striking force: his poetic début in 1985 was awarded the Ivan Krasko Prize. Striking and yet paradoxical was also its title: Furious Little Robinson. Urban used paradox as a working tool from the beginning; he is a poet of intellect. His emotions are more like chilled passions (erotica, sex). In his first book a young man of twenty is saying farewell to the colourful world of childhood and entering the greyness of adulthood... The last collection Snowdrops and Bibles ("symbols of spring and faith") was written by a grown up thirty-year-old mature poet... Urban`s poetry was intellectual and rational. He hates semidarkness, ambiguity, mysterious nooks pretending depth. He is clear and sharp as a knife. He can afford it, because he reached the core of all things human. He has experience and insight and he serves both in precise and concise language full of irony, self-irony, sarcasm and a little scepticism. However, when it comes to it he knows how to express things using big words.

Urban is not afraid of big words. For him Love, Life and Truth are part of everyday life. He very effectively balances dignity and profanity, ever-present kitsch and true art. What is even more important, this time he never leaves the narrow corridor of conveying a lyrical message. He is able to find balance between private, or more precisely inner, space and the world of personal and social relations by which it is influenced. Urban voices the feelings that prevailed in a certain time...

Through his poems, Jozef Urban not only succeeded in activating wide-spread literary critical discussion, but also in engaging the reader, which at the end of the day is more important. Indeed, as a result perhaps for the first time in the history of Slovak literature, popularity, and later image, were openly talked about as positive and important factors for the acceptance of poetry.
He gained sympathy because in the bedrock of each of his texts the dominant idea is struggle: the open struggle of the lyrical subject (clearly autobiographical) - the original loner - with this world, with the present, human hypocrisy, etc. For him, what is not authentic is obviously false, and authenticity is only that which he experiences within the limits of his own human abilities. This important symbol of Urban`s poetry also later manifested itself in his lyrics, essays, and journalism.