Earthly Dust and God's Breath
E-book, Czech
Earthly Dust and God's Breath
The Lyrics for Future Songs Inspired by Biblical Stories
Over the course of forty weeks in 2025, Michal Horáček wrote poems conceived primarily as speeches or dialogues of various biblical characters. With a regular rhythm, rhyme, and chorus, his lyrics enabled future musical arrangements. This gradually created a collection that, in forty selected stops, offers a view of the Old and New Testaments not from a religious perspective, but rather from a generally human and personal one. Alongside the central events, speakers, and actors of the Bible (the creation of the world and the apocalypse, the fall of the Tower of Babel and of Jericho, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection; Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David, Solomon, Jonah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Jesus, Mary, or the apostles), the author accentuates secondary and hidden plots, situations, and characters (the old man Methuselah, the prophetess Miriam, shepherds, the sinful woman, Veronica, soldiers beneath the cross, angels on various rungs of the hierarchy).
The cycle is accompanied by photographs by Jan Šibík, an afterword by the Protestant theologian Miloš Rejchrt, and a note on the book's creation by the editor Daniela Iwashita.
Michal Horáček
Michal Horáček (born 1952), is a lyricist, essayist, writer, journalist, producer and anthropologist (he defended his doctoral dissertation, The Habitus of the Gambler, in 2011, published as a book in 2012). After the poetic libretto Kudykam (2009) and the cycle of Villonian ballads Czech Calendar (2012), the collection of forty texts on biblical themes, Earthly Dust and God's Breath (2026), is his third book of poetry.
Samples to download:
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