The manuscript of Igor Vaverčák’s collection entitled The Sixth Sense of This World presents a compilation of various lyrical procedures, poetics and formal treatments. Here the reader can encounter the "chatty" and yelling poetry of the beatnik generation, but also the quiet and intimate confession of a poet yearning for love. This collection includes poems which from the formal point of view maintain a classical structure and arrangement of verses, but also others which play around with the form of arrangement of their verses, thereby communicating with the reader on the level of form as well as of content. It is quite possible that this variety may appeal to some readers, but in my opinion Vaverčák is best as a poet in the shorter kind of text, where he makes much better use of images and metaphors as well as avoiding strong, "noisy" words. Despite their smaller extent, these poems offer the reader much greater space for their interpretation and for their emotional acceptance, as for example in the poem Fragments, in which the writer uses mere hints and something like real samples or fragments to describe the loving relationship between two people: "In the Akashi chronicle,/ another fall.// A record written with a shaky hand./ The eyes wanted to watch.// Only a closed gate/ and high grass.// And written against the sky/ a message.// From fragments of wheat-ears/ I put you together." In the same way, in other texts devoted to love Igor Vaverčák manages to be poetic, original and gentle. He often transforms love into sensuous perception, or rather he relates his feelings especially by means of sensuous percepts. The poem Perfume thus combines olfactory and auditory stimuli, together creating an interesting image that makes use of the symbols of grass and clouds – symbols apparently set up in mutual opposition – to elicit feelings of incompatibility and contradiction, but also of compactness, feelings which distinguish love: "Touching hair/ that smelled of grass.// And the clouds formed/ images/ which we didn’t recognize." The act that sensuous perception forms one of the fundamental motifs in Vaverčák’s poetry is confirmed by the polysemantic word-play in the title of the collection, where we can understand "sense" in the context of the five physical senses as a bodily organ for perceiving the outside world, but also as the mental content or meaning of something, for example regarding the theme of love, which frequently recurs in his poetry also as an (erotic) instinct.
Peter Karpinský
The Voice
You were just hanging
in the embrace of nature.
The voice
which was seeking you
was not what you wanted to hear.
Only that one
which covers up the insides.
Its resonance
forces a rope into your hands.
And the birdsong
twitters a death-knell.
Spark
You blew into my palm.
And a spark flared.
I went down on my knees.
And begged God!
For you to stop.
I wanted
With the touches of my feet I took in
the warmth of the earth.
With an insatiable gaze
I absorbed the countryside.
I wanted to pluck a flower,
but its colour reminded me
of the blood pulsing into my heart.
I wanted to blow away the clouds too,
but the wind was not strong enough to chase away
so many problems.
Suddenly I felt a lack of warmth,
which I sensed in the tips of my toes.
I caught a thistle in my hand.
It pricked convincingly.
And its odour did not start up
the sixth sense of this world.