Poems Before & After: Collected English translations

Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republics most important poet and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientists 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. Poems Before & After covers thirty years of his poetry. Before are his poems from the fifties and sixties poems written before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: first published in English in his Penguin Selected Poems (1967) and in Bloodaxes The Fly (1987) with some additional poems. After are translations of his later poetry all written after 1968 including not only those from his two Bloodaxe editions On the Contrary (1984) and Supposed to Fly (1996) but also the entire texts of two late collections published by Faber Vanishing Lung Syndrome (1990) and The Rampage (1997). With additional translations by David Young Dana Hábová Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub. 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 Miroslav Holub is one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere – Ted Hughes One of the sanest voices of our time – A. Alvarez 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