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These important poems from the critically acclaimed Zbigniew Herbert span forty years of his incredible life and work and appear for the first time in English. "Elegy for the Departure" includes some sixty verse and prose poems, put into English by award-winning Herbert translators John and Bogdana Carpenter. The poems are organized chronologically from 1950 to 1990, with an emphasis on the writer's early and late poems. In this collection, Herbert's poetry turns from the public to the more personal. The title poem, "Elegy for the Departure of Pen Ink and Lamp," is a three-part farewell ode to the inanimate objects and memories of childhood. Herbert also reflects on the relationship between the living and the dead in "What Our Dead Do," the state of his homeland in "Country," and the power of language in "We Fall Asleep on Words..." "Elegy for the Departure" confirms Herbert's place as one of our most influential poets.

"What is remarkable is the consistently high quality of his work..."

Christopher Merrill, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, 03/28/1999

"[Herbert's] was a disenchanted and ironic voice, but one that seemed to restore hope just as it seemed to be disappearing beyond the 'dark boundary' of modern nihilism....[Y]et while reading [this work], one wonders whether the Herbert we knew, or thought we knew, was the real one. Contempt for tyrants, compassion for victims, moral rectitude and 'simple clarity' struggling with 'trembling uncertainty,' are obviously there, but rather as an echo of a more far-reaching, more ambiguous and eventually more interesting conversation with being."

Jaroslaw Anders, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 08/08/1999

Elegy for the Departure: And Other Poems: Search Results