The Eurekist and other babblings

Some recent writing for those who care about such things. Had the pleasure of contributing to Melissa Mann's always excellent litzine Beat The Dust, reviewed Before The Rain (featuring Peter Wild, Mollie Baxter and Thomas Fletcher) and Annie Clarkson's Winter Hands and finally had a retrospective look over the life and work of the late great Czech poet Miroslav Holub in the garden of earthly delights that is Dogmatika. Slan.

"It's one of the cruel ironies of life that diseases, so debilitating and corrosive, can be stunningly beautiful when viewed under a microscope. At an ultra-magnified level, viruses, bacteria and parasites can appear as swirls of tropical islands, microbe galaxies, kaleidoscopic in colour and pattern. Look at anything close enough, it seems, and its uniqueness will be revealed.

It was a phenomenon that Miroslav Holub, the late great Czech poet, was familiar with both in a scientific sense (he was leading immunologist) and in terms of his artistic view of the world. A Czech by birth, Holub was born in Pilsen, West Bohemia. During his life, his country metamorphosed through invasion and war, suffering the successive tyrannical rule of the Nazis and the Communists. Conscripted as manual labour under the Third Reich, he was a censored "nonperson" under the Soviets and finally something approaching a national institution in the free Czech Republic. If ever there were a witness to history, it was Holub."
to continue...