Konstrukce (/kɒnstrʌkseɪ/) is a Czech word meaning construction. It’s equally correct to say: podívejte se na konstrukci na Krasové! (look at the construction on Krasová!), as it is to say: veškerá morálka je lidská konstrukce (all morality is a human construct).

Constructions [Konstrukce] is a slippery diving board for the new undercurrents of language in a New Stone Age (Micheal March), a sequence of poetry that challenges our ways of communicating, spoken and written. In three distinct poetic movements, the question of certainty in our daily language is opened up.

Reconstructions [Rekonstrukce] elaborates the project that began in Constructions. Voices from the everyday speak through a second-hand language and are confronted with their own lives. These tender, brittle lyrics breathe life into the lost, the inarticulate and the betrayed. (Mark Wynne, Paper View Books)

Deconstructions [Dekonstrukce] marks the culmination of the sequence.  It operates through malfunctions of meaning, creating small glitches in syntax or ripples in context to consistently destabilise our expectations. This de(con)struction is also an act of creation – like a cut cable, with its exposed inner wires splayed out in multiple directions, this collection creates sparks. (Dan Power, Doomsday Press)

Constructions, Reconstructions and Deconstructions are available from tall-lighthouse, Good Press, the London Review Bookshop, and the Poetry Book Society. Selections from the series have been translated into Czech by tall.lighthouse.prague.

The poems insist on ramifications and displacement, proposing an approach to reality that reveals the constructed sides of our language and the destructive potential of the process of poetic creativity. It is a compelling and challenging point of view that attempts to recreate our approach to language and our vision of the world around us. (Write Out Loud)

Konstrukce‘s triptych is assembled from fragments, sentences noted down during online conversations, faults, slips, elements of narrative intentional and accidental. The speakers have mostly Czech, but also Slovak, Ukranian, or Russian, as their central languages, not English. They are friends, tutored students, acquaintances, and strangers. They work in offices, schools, farms, factories, academies, radio-stations, hotels, banks, and warehouses. They show there is no fixed manner of speaking, no true native or grammatically perfect form, only ways to communicate. Pain will always be pain, wrapped in plastic, or in language. A baby can never be inseperated. Words can’t always rotate, and are poor at retaining liquid. Sometimes, even far from the Dead Sea, we can almost see the dead.

Calladine-Jones brilliantly strips language of its pretence. In these poems and reconstructed fragments rooted in our current moment, we witness a stunning endeavour to restore life beyond its mechanics. (Zein Sa’dedin, ignitionpress)