{"title":"Miroslav Holub","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"fly-book-miroslav-holub-9781852240189","title":"The Fly","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 work written by Holub prior to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, later forming the 'Before' part of Poems Before \u0026amp; After: Collected English Translations (1990).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49526350577937,"sku":"GOR006067704","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852240180.jpg?v=1751457107"},{"product_id":"rampage-book-miroslav-holub-9780571192533","title":"Rampage","description":"Far from showing signs of having mellowed with age in the last years of his life, Miroslav Holub gave us, in The Rampage, a collection of poems of startling visionary intensity. The wit, the irony, the formal tightness and the imagistic memorability of his earlier work are all still very much in evidence, but here they are allied to a view of the world that owes as much to the nightmare paintings of Bosch and Breughel as to the findings of modern science, in which Dr Holub himself was an internationally recognised expert. The results, available to us thanks to unusually sympathetic translations, done in consultation with the author, are hair-raisingly immediate in their impact. This was a fitting addition to an already varied and significant output.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49533958619409,"sku":"GOR001720879","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49652959412497,"sku":"GOR002924966","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/057119253X.jpg?v=1751437486"},{"product_id":"dimension-of-the-present-moment-book-miroslav-holub-9780571143382","title":"The Dimension of the Present Moment","description":"A collection of essays from Miroslav Holub, the Czech immunologist and poet. In one essay, the wanton assassination of a musk rat provokes a meticulous meditation on the nature of survival that manages to be both a lucid scientific exposition and a concealed allegory on Central European politics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49540040917265,"sku":"GOR002485039","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50208691421457,"sku":"CIN0571143385G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50866254774545,"sku":"CIN0571143385A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51329298727185,"sku":"CIN0571143385VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52108237046033,"sku":"GOR002786015","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52848777888017,"sku":"GOR002870362","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0571143385.jpg?v=1751008693"},{"product_id":"on-the-contrary-and-other-poems-book-miroslav-holub-9780906427767","title":"On the Contrary and Other Poems","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 \u0026amp; After: Collected English Translations (1990).","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49556918763793,"sku":"GOR002421993","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49660977742097,"sku":"GOR002023917","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0906427762.jpg?v=1751457481"},{"product_id":"shedding-life-book-miroslav-holub-9781571312174","title":"Shedding Life","description":null,"brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49567834997009,"sku":"GOR013047413","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50171574321425,"sku":"CIN157131217XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50392836473105,"sku":"CIN157131217XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/157131217X.jpg?v=1751150334"},{"product_id":"supposed-to-fly-book-miroslav-holub-9781852242749","title":"Supposed to Fly","description":"Miroslav Holub is the Czech Republic's most important poet, and one of her leading scientists. His Poems Before \u0026amp; After: Collected English Translations was recently reissued by Bloodaxe, who also publish The Jingle Bell Principle, a collection of his prose pieces. Supposed to Fly is a highly original and entertaining 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. The book also includes surrealist photographs accompanied by equally surrealist or absurdist captions.    'Holub's boyhood reminiscences are totally unsentimental. They are essentially a surrealist string of seemingly insignificant memories, from the unheated lavatories in his family's flat and collecting cowpats from an airfield for garden manure, to learning Greek while outside his school the first Wehrmacht trucks are rolling into the city, and the burying of politically compromising articles in the garden. Yet just because of their surrealist quality, combined with a light touch of sarcasm, they are often profoundly moving and significant. Not surprisingly - Holub was 15 when Nazi Germany invaded Czechoslovakia - the poems and prose pieces relating to the war, more particularly the heavy Allied air raid on 17 April 1945, are among the most powerful. What is conspicuous in Holub's work is the Czech Soldier Svejk tradition, that typically Czech trait of poking gentle fun at authority, at unquestioningly accepted notions, and at taking oneself too seriously. His new book, with its deliberate focus on his Plzen background, is inevitably anchored in that Czech reality (or surreality) to a far greater extent than his earlier collections.' - Ewald Osers","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49602947350801,"sku":"GOR005723471","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852242744.jpg?v=1751457267"},{"product_id":"jingle-bell-principle-book-miroslav-holub-9781852241230","title":"The Jingle Bell Principle","description":"Miroslav Holub was called 'one of the half-dozen most important poets writing anywhere' (Ted Hughes). In the scientific community his renown rested on such works as Immunology of Nude Mice. In Czechoslovakia he also wrote a highly popular magazine column. When Holub was a non-person, these column articles weren't published under his own name, but everyone knew who'd written them because the style was immediately recognisable as his: a cross between Flann O'Brien and Jonathan Swift, with a dash of Tristram Shandy... the Beachcomber of Wenceslas Square.    Subtitled Notes and objections, maximum length 43 lines, these essaylets are as brilliant and blackly funny as his poetry and as succinct and precisely observed as his scientific writing. In their pausings and musings over daily, supposedly ordinary happenings, they focus on the quirks of human conduct, yet the mirror they prop up to everyday life neither merely distorts nor simply reflects, but pinpoints little facets of human activity which reveal the mortality, thoughts and behaviour of our present age and civilisation.    This selection from Holub's contributions to the magazine Vim (maximum length, 43 lines) is illustrated by the leading Czech cartoonist Vladimir Rencin, with photographs by Vojtech Pisarik.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49662385619217,"sku":"GOR001704978","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852241233.jpg?v=1751426236"},{"product_id":"poems-before-after-book-miroslav-holub-9781852247478","title":"Poems Before \u0026 After","description":"Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's foremost modern poet, and 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. 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Pink pictorial paper cover. Good clean pages with bright copy and firm binding. Light tanning to endpapers and page edges. Paper cover is lightly rub worn and thumbed with light shelf","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50069643526417,"sku":"1628146120ADA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1628146120ADA_1.jpg?v=1722867667"},{"product_id":"miroslav-holub-selected-poems-rare-book-miroslav-holub-1687151556ada","title":"Miroslav Holub - Selected Poems","description":"1967. First Published. 101 pages. Paperback book with illustrated cover. Pages remain bright and clear with minimal tanning and foxing. Pencil inscription to first page. Binding remains firm. 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Tightly bound w","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50081001505041,"sku":"1694691860ALK","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1694691860ALK_1.jpg?v=1722906978"},{"product_id":"poems-before-after-book-miroslav-holub-9781852241223","title":"Poems Before \u0026 After","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.  Poems Before \u0026amp; 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). The first edition of Poems Before \u0026amp; After was published in 1990. A new expanded edition was published in 2006, including 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","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50163814531345,"sku":"GOR003033115","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50647693230353,"sku":"CIN1852241225G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50766847803665,"sku":"GOR014063241","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1852241225.jpg?v=1751457343"},{"product_id":"selected-poems-rare-book-miroslav-holub-1724753302abs","title":"Selected Poems","description":"1967. First Edition. 101 pages. Illustrated paper cover with lettering. Clean pages with light tanning and mild foxing throughout. Binding remains firm. 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By the time of his death in 1998, Miroslav Holub had become one of the most widely acclaimed poets on the planet.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52816233988369,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52816234283281,"sku":"CIN0932440762G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780932440761.jpg?v=1764267777"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-miroslav-holub.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}