Volume 45, Number 14 · September 24, 1998
Loyal Toward Reality
By Michael Scammell
A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology of Poetry
edited and with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz
Harcourt Brace, 320 pp., $26.00
Mysticism for Beginners
by Adam Zagajewski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 71 pp., $20.00
Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination
by Adam Zagajewski
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 265 pp., $24.00
Winter Dialogue
by Tomas Venclova, translated by Diana Senechal
Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, 148 pp., $22.50
In the introduction to an anthology of Polish poetry that he published some thirty years ago, Czeslaw Milosz remarked that 'a historical steamroller' had passed several times through his luckless country, yet Polish poets had frequently benefited from their trials, and had emerged 'perhaps more energetic' than their Western colleagues and 'better prepared' to interpret the human condition. It was a challenging statement at the time, but the intervening thirty years have shown that not only Polish writers but also writers from the other steamrollered countries of Central Europe have had something of their own to tell us.
Review, 4139 words
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