About the Book
This outstanding new translation brings a uniformity of voice to Zbigniew Herbert's entire poetic output, from his first book of poems, String of Light, in 1956, to his final volume, previously unpublished in English, Epilogue Of the Storm. Collected Poems: 1956-1998, as Joseph Brodsky said of Herbert's SSelected Poems, is "bound for a much longer haul than any of us can anticipate." He continues, "For Zbigniew Herbert's poetry adds to the biography of civilization the sensibility of a man not defeated by the century that has been most thorough, most effective in dehumanization of the species. Herbert's irony, his austere reserve and his compassion, the lucidity of his lyricism, the intensity of his sentiment toward classical antiquity, are not just trappings of a modern poet, but the necessary armor--in his case well-tempered and shining indeed--for man not to be crushed by the onslaught of reality. By offering to his readers neither aesthetic nor ethical discount, this poet, in fact, saves them frorn that poverty which every form of human evil finds so congenial. As long as the species exists, this book will be timely."
About the Author :
Zbigniew Herbert was born in Lwów, Poland, in 1924. Herbert studied law, economics, and philosophy at the universities of Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw. His books include Selected Poems, Mr Cogito, Report from the Besieged City and Other Poems, Barbarian in the Garden, Still Life with a Bridle, The King of the Ants, and Reconstruction of the Poet.
Review :
"Zbigniew Herbert is a poet for this place; above all, for this time." - Joseph Brodsky
"[Herbert] is a poet with all the strengths of an Antaeus. . . . [He] shoulders the whole sky and scope of human dignity and responsibility." - Seamus Heaney
"If the ket to contemporary Polish poetry is the collective experience of the last decades, Herbert is perhaps the most skillful in expressing it." - Czeslaw Milosz
"[Herbert's] poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet." - A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books
"Zbigniew Herbert [was] one of the greatest Polish writers of this century. He is a figure comparable to, say, T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden." - Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker
"This impeccably, newly translated and edited volume finds Herbert, strongly anticommunist throughout his life, determined to resist the reduction of the human to anything easily measured, manipulated and forgotten...Tender, wary, melancholy and wry, the poems visit ideas of redemption as one might visit a grave site, i.e., knowing that what you seek can only be experienced in the heart and mind...Finally, the work of this powerful master of 20th-century literature is all in one place." - Publishers Weekly
"...this volume...is very welcome." - Rain Taxi
"...for most of us, discovering 'the Poland that is real' means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year - possibly in many years - is Zbigniew Herbert's 'Collected Poems, 1956-1998'...this 'Collected Poems' is the likeliest path to this poet's achievement..." - New York Times Book Review
"It is as if Herbert's star, the one that shone tirelessly with beauty and wisdom for over forty years, has begun to fade in the eyes and minds of the reading public. Needless to say, this book...could not have come out at a better time." - World Literature Today
"Herbert...is one of the few postwar poets whose work both is on the highest plane and comes over with terrific velocity in English...This new collection ensures that Herbert's work will continue to send powerful signals, as the poet reports from his besieged city..." - BookForum
"From his first book of poems, A String of Light (1956), to his ninth and last effort, Epilogue of a Storm (1998), Herbert (1924-98) showed himself to be a major poet... By the time he published his fifth book, Mr. Cogito (1974), Herbert had perfected his ability to look at life from an ironic distance, embodied in Mr. Cogito, a fictitious character who seems to be Herbert's alter ego. A "Richard Cory" figure, Mr. Cogito survives not because life is easy but because he, like Herbert, sees himself as the chronicler of life's hardships. Highly recommended for all libraries." - Library Journal (starred review)
"Zbigniew Herbert, who was born in 1924 in Lwów and died in Warsaw in 1998, was one of the great poets of our time. His compatriots Czeslaw Milosz and Wyslawa Szymborska, who were both awarded the Nobel Prize in recent years, may now be more famous, but he surely belongs in their company, as this book with its many truly extraordinary poems fully demonstrates. Herbert was the most original of the three and the funniest. Only a mixture of seriousness and comedy could do justice to his experience, which included wartime horrors, totalitarianism, and exile...Selected Poems in the Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1968...introduced Herbert's poems to American readers. I'm willing to bet that no one who read them ever forgot them." - New York Review of Books
"Now, nearly 10 years after his death, Herbert's voice is gathered, uncensored and unimaginably strong, in one dynamic volume." - San Francisco Chronicle
