VICTOR BRUXI
by Ornella Magli

Reading Victor Bruxi’s poems and novels, one might suspect that, as a young testosterone-redolant man, Bruxi spent several years living the callow life of an itinerant shepherd tending his flock on the slopes of Moravia’s Beskydy Mountains. This would be a logical deduction in light of the hyperbolic specificity of Bruxi’s bucolic descriptions of the sexual act.

But such a deduction would be bes kydy, without fertile ground. In actual fact Bruxi had a rough & tumble early childhood on the mean streets and brutal public elementary schools of Ostrava before managing to swindle his way into Brno’s most exclusive private boarding school, the Akademie Vinculum. From there, at the age of sixteen, he launched himself upon Vienna, where he lurched in and out of various universities and in and out of various women’s … affections. He was widely known as expert plowman, but in truth he’d never seen a plow.

Thus we know not from whence comes Bruxi’s flamboyant interest in and baroque expression of the sensual geography of fornication, the tectonics of lust, the botany and topology of human bodies copulating; we know only that he writes as if frenzied with daring. Sitting pompous in the saddle (for Eros loves dressing up) Bruxi charges forward from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph without foresight, like a well-bred but inexperienced hunting dog, mindful of nothing but the chase.

For Bruxi, sex is like mountain-climbing on LSD, that corrosive acid that burns away the mundane veneers of psychological projection and reveals the magical surfaces beneath: the dank, mossy textures of the body, the brute pricks gouging like ice-axes into frozen crevasses, the spew and flotsam and debris of the carnal. In his later works, the dark shadows lengthen and the carnal eventually becomes the charnel, but in this earlier work there is a sweetness like an Alpen postcard: these poems are filled with shouting, running, whipping, yelping, barking and whinnying as shepherds and picklocks and chimney-sweeps romp and gambol amidst the pastures, peat bogs and cosy cottages of an hallucinogenic trans-Europa.

Dangers do lurk, in the forms of wolves, tubers, chasms and itches, but there is in the end enjoyment in all the contests, delight in all the fears, and sweetness in the dangers. Drawing raw sound right up out of sex like the eye draws gold from a sunset, Bruxi both hunts the erotic and teaches others to hunt it. And how fine indeed it is to see Eros herself here on the ground before us: dress up above her hips, shoulders naked, faced flushed red, breasts heaving….