Book "POEMS & DRAWINGS" English edition
The English edition of our book "POEMS & DRAWINGS" is out now and available for purchase.
It is a perfect symbiosis of visual and verbal art. The drawings were the impulse for Helena to start writing poetry, so bear in mind that the pictures came first, not vice versa.
Scroll down for the annotation and for bio of the poetess.
Authors: Helena Lněničková and Nicol Francis Hendruk
The English edition of our book "POEMS & DRAWINGS" is out now and available for purchase.
It is a perfect symbiosis of visual and verbal art. The drawings were the impulse for Helena to start writing poetry, so bear in mind that the pictures came first, not vice versa.
Scroll down for the annotation and for bio of the poetess.
Authors: Helena Lněničková and Nicol Francis Hendruk
The English edition of our book "POEMS & DRAWINGS" is out now and available for purchase.
It is a perfect symbiosis of visual and verbal art. The drawings were the impulse for Helena to start writing poetry, so bear in mind that the pictures came first, not vice versa.
Scroll down for the annotation and for bio of the poetess.
Authors: Helena Lněničková and Nicol Francis Hendruk
Can drawings be so powerful that they can turn you into a poet? Nicol’s drawings can.
I am a living proof of it.
The book you are holding is a result of this magic, it is a symbiosis of visual and verbal art. My poems are my reaction to the expressiveness of the drawings, they are a personal confession as well as an interpretation of the pictures. They are depicting what the drawings may only hint at.
Nicol draws from her imagination, without any message intended, it is just a play for her. And my words are telling stories of every picture, either the obvious ones or the hidden ones. But all of them are also part of a story of my life: the spiral of longing, desire and loving, followed by hurting and heartbreaking. And almost lethal life-aching.
Simply put, my poems are Nicol's drawings translated into words.
But how come Nicol was drawing my life experiences without even knowing I existed?
Helena Lněničková (*1981, Litomyšl, CZ)
I grew up among fields and meadows, in a small village in the Czech Republic. I have always been a keen reader of both Czech and English literature but my creative writing skills were dormant for a long time. I started with a personal blog in 2020 and after getting positive reviews, I took on a more challenging task: writing an auto-fiction novel that compares my mother’s life to my own. Having finished that, I came across Nicol’s art and contacted her to choose a cover for this novel. I had no idea that our encounter would mark the start of an exciting art project.
Nicol's pictures literally enchanted me and brought out my memories. Enraptured and filled with strong impressions as I was, words started coming to my mind that would describe the feelings emanating from the drawings. I began to write down what was flying through my head and I was surprised at the poignant descriptions and twists that appeared on the paper. The poems were born in the process of writing, without a plan and without thinking. I simply waited for words to float in. Most of the poems were written in one go, in the evenings between February and May 2022.
Soon afterwards, we decided to create a book containing Nicol’s drawings and my poems and a year later we published it.
As I have a Master’s degree in English Philology, I dared to translate the poems myself. The process of translation was thrilling. It was more like re-creating the poems, as I did not stick to the original form or content. I needed to be free of any preconception because when I tried to be true to the Czech version, it did not work and I ended up with a dead text. So then I just put the first verse or the main idea of the poem into English and let the language itself do the job. And the outcome was amazing. With rhymes in another tongue, there came new meanings to the poems and my joy of creation was immense.
And this is the story of how I became a poetess.