Rampage

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.