Despite being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1984, much of Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert's work has yet to be translated into English. Publication of Early Poetry will earn for Seifert well-deserved literary recognition. Seifert's poetry is strongly situated within the Czech literary tradition of Poetism, which evolved into a playful, lighthearted refuge from world history while maintaining an edge of social consciousness.

Although many of Heine's poems are deceptively simple on the surface, the multiple allusions, word plays, and shifts and breaks in diction and tone make them almost untranslatable. Arndt not only renders the meaning of the originals, but preserves the poems' rhyme schemes as well as their moods and multiple cultural resonance.

The book tells the story of individual artists in Central Europe who believed in art's power to change the world; they imagined a collective of human beings living happily in a free society liberated of injustice and inequality.

For this sequence of poems, organized like so many reflecting mirrors that amongst one another exchange an infinite commentary, the historic reference and point of departure is Catullus and the work where the first century Latin poet tells of his passion for Lesbia, whom he by turns and concurrently loved and hated.

A poignant sequence of poems traces the evolution of a divorce while exploring themes of love, sex, sorrow, memory and freedom as reflected by everyday familiarities and the poignancy of former lovers parting, in a collection by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of The Dead and the Living.

Although Seifert lived through the many historic turns of his homeland, his was not a political poetry, except in its constant expression of love for his homeland, its beauties and its values. He was the great poet of Prague, of love, of the senses. His work was unpretentious, lyrical yet irreverent, earthy, charming. Seifert was known for the simplicity of his verse, yet his poems are full of surprises, never what at first they seem.