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“... storage for four days, however, and when the festival was over, he informed them that there was no Holub on the scene. So it was easy to become a political phenomenon by means of a mere reading of mere poems. When fighting dull intellect, you always feel more significant than you really are. And now we have to revise the estimate of our significance. I have ...”

“... The ‘courage of not knowing’ is in fashion among artists nowadays and the new democracies of Central Europe excel in it. Science is almost a dirty word, or, at best, simply one of many ways to acquire knowledge. Publishers and editors seem to believe that the broad public underwent a mutation after 1989 when they started to hate molecular genetics, taking up instead with psychedelic phenomena and the works of St Augustine ...”

“... into an equivocal, laconic humour that proves continually thought-provoking and affecting. Miroslav Holub is not only Czechoslovakia’s best-known poet: he is also an internationally respected immunologist. Like the American poet William Carlos Williams, whose work he greatly admires, Holub has always insisted ...”

“... of its series of modern European poets. Popa was then usually grouped with Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, two other astonishingly original East European poets, whose work was plainly unlike anything being written in Britain and the United States. Encountering in Popa an exotic blend of avant-garde poetry and popular folklore, the foreign reader ...”

“... passages in French). At a guess, I would say that in developing this style he has been affected by Miroslav Holub, whom he greatly admires, and who can sound like this in English: Inside there may be growing An abandoned room, Bare walls, pale squares where pictures hung, a disconnected phone, feathers settling on the floor the encyclopedists have moved ...”

“... other societies quietism and political frustration are not opposed attitudes or states of mind. In Miroslav Holub’s Czechoslovakia; the poet and the critic know that the act of writing is both necessary and absurd. This is the sharp, precise point of ‘Swans in Flight’, where the swans circle ‘and that means that Fortinbras’s army is ...”

“... that I should be even-handed about this, nor that I should venture judgments of Vasko Popa or Miroslav Holub on the basis of poems selected by, and translations commissioned by, a person so deeply self-deceiving as Weissbort reveals himself to be. Yehuda Amichai, learning from Weissbort in 1986 about this anthology, decided that it was to be an ...”

“... Poets like Zbigniew Herbert, ‘neither vindictive against art nor occluded to pain’, or Miroslav Holub, whose awareness of the ‘bounded condition’ of life in the Eastern bloc ensures his ‘inner freedom’, can teach us not to be abashed. The terms of Heaney’s own reckoning with Irish experience are revealed by his tribute to ...”

“... of Modern European Poets in Translation, he was championing poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and Miroslav Holub, whose preoccupations were more wide-ranging and, in many ways, more urgent. What seems to have characterised Alvarez’s tortuous path is his continual rolling back of the many false claims and promises – the blandishments – of ...”

“... existence in Soviet Russia (though he didn’t escape censure). The same stratagems were used by Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia and Danilo Kis in Yugoslavia. Ugrešić has been circling this territory for a while. In her new book, the tradition of upside-down, modernist myth-making or ironical fable has freed her tongue. Skittish at ...”

“... Gertrude Stein; but it could easily be one of the voices of Morgan. Yet where Morgan, like Miroslav Holub, chose to stay in his native land whether or not he was happy with its literary or party politics, Porter’s relationship with Australia was more problematic. Morgan could write a confident essay in the 1970s entitled ‘The Resources of ...”

“... most we can hold together at any one time, experientially speaking. ‘In this sense,’ writes Miroslav Holub, ‘our ego lasts three seconds.’ His claim is tangential to mine. I don’t think that the brevity of the ‘conscious now’ necessarily contributes to the sense of hiatus or newness, for our experience could resemble a narrow beam of ...”

“... the proximity of the great 20th-century poets of Central and Eastern Europe: Akhmatova, Herbert, Holub, Szymborska, Zagajewski. What is the more striking about this is that it seems to have been done largely without books, or without external knowledge. This fact emerges less from the poems themselves, which are cool, brittle and uncomplaining – it’s ...”