Between Two Fires is about the transnational movement of poetry during the Cold War. Beginning in the 1950s, it examines transnational engagements across the Iron Curtain, reassessing U.S. poetry through a consideration of overlooked radical poets of the mid-century, and then asking what such transactions tell us about the way that anglophone culture absorbed new models during this period. The Cold War synchronized culture across the globe, leading to similar themes, forms, and critical maneuvers. Poetry, a discourse routinely figured as distant from political concerns, was...

Springtide

A chaffinch in a tree
of cherry sings merrily
spring's introit.

Its blazing bobble dwells
in leaves, alive, and swells
in scarlet.

The flowers are flares of white.
The chaffinch has gone quiet
and turned sky-gazer.

My eyes close on the day:
an orb revolves in grey
and red and azure.

Poet and artist Bohuslav Reynek spent most of his life in the relative obscurity of the Czech-Moravian Highlands; although he suffered at the hands of the Communist regime, he cannot be numbered among the dissident poets of Eastern...