On reading Narrative Poems I, a particular music enters the mind: The echo of a ballad. It doesn't happen by chance. It is the tragic and mysterious ballad Maj by the Czech romantic poet K. H. Macha, that impressed Holan with its characters and its ritornello as a wonderful way of telling stories in the popular style. In 1938, the menace of war made Czech poets react and face the Nazi occupation bravely. Holan, in particular, changed his style to be clearer, to fight, and become the one people knew by heart. So the fight for the freedom went together with being closer to people. This tendency...

Through all the changes in direction of Holan's life and work, the word wall took on an immense breadth of meaning to him. He chose the epigraph "thy walls are always before my eyes" from the prophet Isaiah to refl ect the sensory boundaries of the body and the boundaries of existence. Th is book is an anthology of Holan's poems connected by the central motif of a wall or walls. The walls of creation, the walls of words that open to vision and hearing, are dramatically rendered in small poetic portraits (Keats and Homer) and in certain echoes or responses to the poetry of, for instance,...