Vladimir Holan. Holan is a Czech poet. I first came across his work in a box of books in a house on the shores of Belfast Lough. The house was owned by one of my English Lecturers. She had moved out, and myself and a few other students rented rooms. The box, a treasure trove, contained works by most of the major East European poets of the 20th Century. Many of them signed by their authors. I toyed with the idea of diverting some of these into my posession, but couldn’t convince myself that it would be somehow ok to do so. Geekily, I remember each book vividly. In fact, I remember more of them than I do of the degree I was supposed to be studying for. Holan was in there. Selections from ‘A Night With Hamlet’, his most famous long poem, and many of his shorter poems, for which he is best known. I know little about his personal life: he was a Catholic, left the church. joined the Communist Party, left the Communist Party, and rejoined the Church. A classic pattern. In his later years he lived in the centre of Prague, as a recluse. I don’t know enough about Czech literature to contextualise him within his native tradition. But he certainly appears to be different from other European poets of his generation. His shorter pieces engage in a kind of sorting, a zoom-lense attempt to discriminate amongst phenomena in order to uncover and frame the undefinable. When his shorter pieces are successful, he reveals something that you know cannot be made visible in any other way. (Between)