
On the Contrary and Other Poems
Miroslav Holub(Author)
Bloodaxe Books Ltd (Publisher)
Published on 25. October 1984
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-0-906427-76-7 (ISBN)
Description
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. He was first introduced to English readers with a Penguin Selected Poems in 1967. This book presents a decade of new work written since since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, later forming the 'After' part of Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations (1990).
Reviews / Votes
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 HeaneyMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-906427-76-7 (9780906427767)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Miroslav Holub (1923-98) was the Czech Republic's most important poet, and also one of her leading immunologists. His Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations (Bloodaxe Books, 1990/2006) 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). Supposed to Fly - now out of print in its original edition - was an entertaining, illustrated gathering of poems with some prose interruptions drawn from his native city of Plzen, perhaps better known, for its world-famous beer, by its German name of Pilsen. Bloodaxe also publishes The Jingle Bell Principle, a book of Holub's prose pieces.