Miroslav Holub was the Czech Republic's most important poet, and also one of her leading immunologists. His fantastical and witty poems give a scientist's bemused view of human folly and other life on the planet. Mixing myth, history and folktale with science and philosophy, his plainly written, sceptical poems are surreal mini-dramas often pivoting on paradoxes. He was first introduced to English readers with a Penguin Selected Poems in 1967. This book presents work written by Holub prior to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, later forming the 'Before' part of Poems Before & After: Collected English Translations (1990).