Conversation With the Prince and Other Poems (English and Polish Edition)

Tadeusz Rózewicz was born in 1921 in Radomsko. With Czeslaw Milosz and Zbigniew Herbert, he is a major figure in the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience.

`What I produced is poetry for the horror-stricken. For those abandoned to butchery. For survivors. We learnt language from scratch, those people and I.' Distrusting myths and archetypes, and rejecting traditional aesthetic values which struck him as offensive and gratuitous in the face of what he had witnessed, Rózewicz created a stark, direct poetry devoid of embellishment and rooted in common speech, fashioned as he has written `out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words, words from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery.'

But Rózewicz's poetry is far from being confined to recording the horrors of the past. He is committed to poetry as a way of life, to the transmutation of a whole world of experience, from the seemingly trivial to the profound. He is a natural social realist whose subject-matter is extremely varied; his delight in ordinary human existence, and the precision with which he traces it, make him a rich, humane and very accessible poet. His poetry translates effectively in its clarity of expression and outline. This selection, the most extensive to appear in English, is drawn from thirty-five years of Rózewicz's prolific writing and will confirm his standing as a major European poet of our time.