Out of the rain and under the roof

Miloň Čepelka wrote about the author's debut poetry collection: "I am truly delighted by Josef Pepson Snětivý's collection. Until now, I knew him as an imaginative, outspoken, ironic, and self-deprecating prose writer, both a novelist and a short-story writer, as well as an enthusiastic musician, composer, lyricist, and performer, and now he has revealed himself to me as a poet. And I understood that a man still in love, who looks up to women with respect, because he rightly sees in them both a source of inspiring pleasure and a corrective to masculine dreamy flights of fancy, disruptors but also guardians of a lost and ever-so-briefly regained desired balance, partners who open for us, if not a door, then certainly at least a peephole into our conscience and into the mysterious spaces behind apparent reality, cannot help but be a poet. Poetry worthy of the name strives to help us in the same way, and that is why, after my initial astonishment, I soon stopped being surprised by his verses and began to gratefully savour them in the very diversity of their tones, which range from epigram, haiku, litany, et cetera, to a mere sigh, an exclamation, or a strictly measured sonnet. They are charged both positively and negatively, but they are charged. Energy bursts from them, and it awakens me, compels me to read and not to be afraid to live. Not to wait for once-and-for-all answers—they don't exist, after all—but to ask, ask, ask. I believe that if you open yourselves to them, they will evoke the same echo and the same appetite in you. And I wish you that with all my heart."