Jan Zahradníček (1905–1960) is one of the most important contemporary poets of Czechoslovakia, and indeed all of Europe. Since his debut in 1931, his striking expressionistic poems had a major impact on the development of the modern Czech poetic idiom. They are also of great historical significance, as Zahradníček was to witness two of the great upheavals of Central Europe in the twentieth century: the Nazi occupation of his homeland from 1938 to 1945, and the long night of Communism which descended upon Czechoslovakia following 1948.

The present English translation of his works contains the six great collections of his later years. Besides Rouška Veroničina [Veronica’s Veil] (the last collection of poetry he published in the now Soviet-dominated Czechoslovak state), we find his two great prophetic works: La Salette and Znamení moci [Sign of Power], as well as the collections Dům strach [Fear House] and Čtyři léta [Four Years]. Sign of Power was composed shortly before his incarceration by the Communist authorities on trumped-up charges of treason, while Fear House and Four Years contain poems written mostly in prison.

Zahradníček’s prison experience was made all the more difficult by the accidental death by toadstool poisoning of his two young daughters. A great Catholic poet in the tradition of Dante and Eliot, Jan Zahradníček appears in these poems as a man of unshakeable trust in the love of God, which helped him to bear these personal tragedies, and that of his unjust imprisonment, with an almost supernatural patience.

As translator Charles S. Kraszewski writes in the introduction to the works, Jan Zahradníček is more than a poet. He is a great example to us all, a modern confessor and martyr: “His faith, his strength, his compassion, and his acceptance of personal tragedy, no less than his unwillingness to hate his persecutors, and his calm, strong faith in God during persecution, are the things that ought to lead to canonisation by acclamation”.