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.
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 Bloodaxe's 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).
'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
