Oberlin College Press

Miroslav Holub

INTENSIVE CARE: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS

Paper $19.95 (ISBN 0-932440-76-2) Cloth $25.95 (ISBN 0-932440-75-4)

This collection spans almost 40 years of writing, much of it under circumstances that involved risk and silence, living under Communism in Czechoslovakia, pursuing a career as a scientist, and carrying on this century's experimental tradition as represented by artists like Arp, Miro, and William Carlos Williams. By the time of his death in 1998, Miroslav Holub had become one of the most widely acclaimed poets on the planet.

Intensive Care includes many new poems appearing here for the first time, as well as a generous selection of earlier work.

"An excellent introduction to the entire range of Holub's output, Intensive Care will be numbered among the works by which the times we live in will be remembered and known."
--Harvard Review

See also Holub's Interferon, or On Theater and Vanishing Lung Syndrome.

TWO IN A LANDSCAPE

In a bare landscape with dry vineyards,
here and there a mammoth, overgrown with newsprint
like scales. A head in front
and another head in the rear. It watches us
intently.

In a wooden shack, our backs against
a rotten door. The trunk approaches
through the gaping window. You protect me with your hair's shadow.
I protect you with an indigo whisper.

Nonetheless we come back.
We come back eternally,
head thrown back
against head erect.

Eyeball to eyeball.

--Miroslav Holub
translated by David Young & Miroslav Holub