Miroslav Holub - Vanishing Lung Syndrome

I recently came across Vanishing Lung Syndrome, by Miroslav Holub from the Field Translations Series 16 (1990), translated by David Young & Dana Hábová. Better late than never, I suppose, but I can’t believe something this fascinating and excellent has been just one room over for twenty years. Well, there you go. I’m making amends.

This book feels, for the want of a better word, appropriate. As soon as I’m finished reading it, I’m going to order his selected poems, titled Intensive Care, that Field also put out (in 1996). Follow the link below to check it out, and then order it (or Vanishing Lung Syndrome) immediately.

http://www.questia.com/library/book/intensive-care-selected-and-new-poems-by-miroslav-holub.jsp

It’s rare I find a poet whose world I feel I’ve been living in, as strongly as I feel it right now. I’m pleased. There’s a new thing in my world that was there all along.


Night Calamities


The storm
went crazy in the darkness.
Prison cells opened.

The sentenced innocents
stamp on the jumping tower. The next routine
is the triple screw dive while
the tiny infantile Decalogue
drowns by a bank where
tunnel waters
thunderously wash away
flowers from a grave.

Our heel caught in the travertine,
we stare into the runaway dark,
but only the permanently invisible ones
can see us.

The prophet Calchas, just off hand,
categorically demands that the already burned
be burned at the stake, while agreeably whining,
not-so-bright laureates
ride the escalator, as
cities burn down and choke beyond the horizon
and the airport holds a register
of historical errors.

And early, at dawn,
in a burning plane, before the explosion,
a little boy walks down the aisle and says—
Are we there yet, Mommy?