Description: "The first uncensored, English-language translation of a Polish dissident poet's brave act of witness in post-World-War-II Europe. The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called "a strange and beautiful testimony," merging "Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective." Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a poete maudit and solidarity with a hurt and manipulated community. The collection Our Life Grows appeared first in an edition crippled by communist censorship, then in 1978, in the uncensored Paris edition that forms the basis for this translation. These poems, combining a biting wit and rigorously questioning mind with a surreal imagination, are a vital part of the story of postwar Europe"--
Review Quotes: "Krynicki has a rare gift of naming things even in shortest poems; he goes straight to the essence. Among Polish poets and readers he has the reputation of a master, of an archer who never misses." --Adam Zagajewski
"His dense verbal play, his allusive language, was always a way of challenging official speech and ideology, normative language, normative feeling." --Edward Hirsch