Sylva Fischerova is one of the most formidable Czech poets of her generation. A distinguished classicist who teaches at Charles University in Prague, she writes poetry with a vivid imagination as well as historical reach, and was first published in English as a young poet by Bloodaxe in 1990. Her poetry moves in and out of historical events, with an understanding and loving eye on our frailties as well as our corruptive acts, against the backdrop of her commanding sense of space and time, and 'makes beauty from monsters'. Mixing semantic and sonorous sense, her poems come to life through metamorphosed moments, showing that nothing can be taken literally in a world 'endowed with sense and meaning'.