Magnetic Point: Selected Poems

With a splendid selection from a half century of marvelous poems, a major Polish poet appears in English at last

One of Poland's greatest living poets―now in English at last―Ryszard Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp, the son of Polish slave laborers. His 1969 volume, Act of Birth, marked the emergence of a major voice in the "New Wave" of Polish poetry. In Krynicki's work, political and poetic rebellion converged during the 1970s and '80s, he was arrested on trumped-up charges and forbidden from publishing. But his poetry is hardly just political. From the early dissident poems to his recent haiku, Krynicki's lyrical work taps deep wells of linguistic acuity, mysticism, compression, and wit.

Ryszard Krynicki―an editor, publisher, and acclaimed translator as well as a poet―lives in Krakow with six cats and his collaborator Krystyna Krynicka, with whom he runs a5, one of Poland’s finest publishing houses. His poetry has won the Polish Poets' Award, the Robert Graves-PEN Club Award, and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literature Prize.

Winner of the NBCC in criticism, Clare Cavanagh is the Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Her translations include Wislawa Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems, with Stanislaw Baranczak, and Adam Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration.