One of the most gifted poets of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a contemporary classic. Few writers in poetry or prose have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that are the trademarks of his work. His wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet returning to the themes that have defined his career—moving medita...

A stunning, intimate collection by the late great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.. . . I think I sought wisdom(without resignation) in poemsand also a certain calm madness.I found, much later, a moment's joyand melancholy's dark contentment.In True Life, the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, one of the world's most admired and beloved poets, turns his gaze to the past with piercing clarity and a tone of wry, lyrical mel...

"Engagingly warm and witty blend of literary comment and memoir," fourteen essays from one of Poland's most prominent contemporary poets ( Publishers Weekly ).Ardor, inspiration, the soul, the sublime: Such terms have long since fallen from favor among critics and artists alike. In this collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of m...

A stunning new collection from Poland's leading poetGive me back my childhood,republic of loquacious sparrows,measureless thickets of nettlesand the timid wood owl's nightly sobs.One of the most vibrant voices of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a modern master of the poetic form. In Asymmetry, his first collection of poems in five years, he revisits the themes that have long concerned him: the end...

The highway became the Red Sea.We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.You drove; I looked at you with love.—from "Storm"One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It...

A new essay collection by the noted Polish poetFor Adam Zagajewski—one of Poland's great poets—the project of writing, whether it be poetry or prose, is an occasion to advance what David Wojahn has characterized as his "restless and quizzical quest for self-knowledge." Slight Exaggeration is an autobiographical portrait of the poet, arranged not chronologically but with that same luminous quality that distinguishes Zagajewski's spellbinding poetry—an affini...

'Like rotting stakes in a forest clearing'The great journalist of conflict in the Third World finds an even stranger and more exotic society in his own home of post-War PolandPenguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and G...

A career-spanning collection of poetry from the Russian American author and winner of the 1987 Nobel Prize for Literature.Joseph Brodsky spent his life advocating for the place of the poet in society. As Derek Walcott said of him, "Joseph was somebody who lived poetry . . . He saw being a poet as being a sacred calling." The poems in this volume span Brodsky's career, which was marked by his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972. Together, they represent the proje...

"A final book like no other" from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Tin Drum: poetry and meditations on writing, aging, and living until the end ( The Irish Times).In spite of the trials of old age, and with the end in sight, Günter Grass weaves his life's reflections together into a witty and elegiac swansong: love letters, soliloquies, jealous musings, social satire, and moments of happiness long to be shared.As the inimitable German...

The perfect introduction to the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz, “one of the greatest poets of our time, perhaps the greatest” (Joseph Brodsky)Widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of our time, Czeslaw Milosz is a master of probing inquiry and graceful expression. Unflinching, outspoken, and unsentimental, Milosz digs among the rubble of the past, choosing from the bad as well as the good, forging a vision that encompasses pain as well as joy. His work is “one of t...

Kenneth Koch has been called “one of our greatest poets” by John Ashbery, and “a national treasure” in the 2000 National Book Award Finalist Citation.Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections–from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962, to A Possible World, published in 2002, the year of the poet’s death–are gathered in one volume.Celebrating the pleasures of friendship, art, and love, the poetry of Ken...

Osip Mandelstam is one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets and Voronezh Notebooks, a sequence of poems composed between 1935 and 1937 when he was living in internal exile in the Soviet city of Voronezh, is his last and most exploratory work. Meditating on death and survival, on power and poetry, on marriage, madness, friendship, and memory, challenging Stalin between lines that are full of the sights and sounds of the steppes, blue sky and black earth, the roads, winter bre...