Translated from the Czech by Ian & Jarmila Milner, Ewald Osers, George Theiner, David Young, Dana Hábová, Rebekah Bloyd and Miroslav Holub

Before are his poems from the 1950s and 60s, poems written before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, mostly first published in English in his Penguin Selected Poems (1967) and in Bloodaxe’s The Fly (1987).

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).

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

’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