Poems Before & After

<p>Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's most important poet and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. Mixing myth history and folktale with science and philosophy his plainly written sceptical poems are surreal mini-dramas often pivoting on paradoxes.</p><p><br></p><p><em>Poems Before & After</em> covers thirty years of his poetry. <em>Before</em> are his poems from the fifties and sixties poems written before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: first published in English in his Penguin <em>Selected Poems</em> (1967) and in Bloodaxe's <em>The Fly</em> (1987) with some additional poems. <em>After</em> are translations of his later poetry all written after 1968 including not only those from his two Bloodaxe editions <em>On the Contrary</em> (1984) and <em>Supposed to Fly</em> (1996) but also the entire texts of two late collections published by Faber <em>Vanishing Lung Syndrome </em>(1990) and <em>The Rampage</em> (1997).</p><p><br></p><p>'A laying bare of things not so much the skull beneath the skin more the brain beneath the skull; the shape of relationships politics history; the rhythms of affections and disaffection; the ebb and flow of faith hope violence art' - Seamus Heaney</p><p><br></p><p>'Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere' - Ted Hughes</p><p><br></p><p>'One of the sanest voices of our time' - A. Alvarez</p><p><br></p><p>'He is a magnificent astringent genius and this volume sings with an oblique and cutting candour a tubular coolness we must praise again and again' - Tom Paulin</p>