“Zbigniew Herbert is a poet for this place; above all, for this time.” - Joseph Brodsky
“[Herbert] is a poet with all the strengths of an Antaeus. . . . [He] shoulders the whole sky and scope of human dignity and responsibility.” - Seamus Heaney
“If the ket to contemporary Polish poetry is the collective experience of the last decades, Herbert is perhaps the most skillful in expressing it.” - Czeslaw Milosz
“[Herbert’s] poems, even in English, seem to me finer than anything currently being written by any English or American poet.” - A. Alvarez, The New York Review of Books
“Zbigniew Herbert [was] one of the greatest Polish writers of this century. He is a figure comparable to, say, T.S. Eliot or W.H. Auden.” - Edward Hirsch, The New Yorker
“This impeccably, newly translated and edited volume finds Herbert, strongly anticommunist throughout his life, determined to resist the reduction of the human to anything easily measured, manipulated and forgotten…Tender, wary, melancholy and wry, the poems visit ideas of redemption as one might visit a grave site, i.e., knowing that what you seek can only be experienced in the heart and mind…Finally, the work of this powerful master of 20th-century literature is all in one place.” - Publishers Weekly
“…this volume…is very welcome.” - Rain Taxi
“…for most of us, discovering ‘the Poland that is real’ means reading works translated from Polish. The most significant such translation this year – possibly in many years – is Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Collected Poems, 1956-1998’…this ‘Collected Poems’ is the likeliest path to this poet’s achievement…” - New York Times Book Review
“It is as if Herbert’s star, the one that shone tirelessly with beauty and wisdom for over forty years, has begun to fade in the eyes and minds of the reading public. Needless to say, this book…could not have come out at a better time.” - World Literature Today
“Herbert…is one of the few postwar poets whose work both is on the highest plane and comes over with terrific velocity in English…This new collection ensures that Herbert’s work will continue to send powerful signals, as the poet reports from his besieged city…” - BookForum
“From his first book of poems, A String of Light (1956), to his ninth and last effort, Epilogue of a Storm (1998), Herbert (1924-98) showed himself to be a major poet… By the time he published his fifth book, Mr. Cogito (1974), Herbert had perfected his ability to look at life from an ironic distance, embodied in Mr. Cogito, a fictitious character who seems to be Herbert’s alter ego. A “Richard Cory” figure, Mr. Cogito survives not because life is easy but because he, like Herbert, sees himself as the chronicler of life’s hardships. Highly recommended for all libraries.” - Library Journal (starred review)
“Zbigniew Herbert, who was born in 1924 in Lwów and died in Warsaw in 1998, was one of the great poets of our time. His compatriots Czeslaw Milosz and Wyslawa Szymborska, who were both awarded the Nobel Prize in recent years, may now be more famous, but he surely belongs in their company, as this book with its many truly extraordinary poems fully demonstrates. Herbert was the most original of the three and the funniest. Only a mixture of seriousness and comedy could do justice to his experience, which included wartime horrors, totalitarianism, and exile…Selected Poems in the Penguin Modern European Poets series in 1968…introduced Herbert’s poems to American readers. I’m willing to bet that no one who read them ever forgot them.” - New York Review of Books
“Herbert was not specifically a poet of World War II and its attendant horrors, because, without equivocating, he saw further. In a poem made relatively famous after Sept. 11, Zagajewski wrote: ‘Try to praise the mutilated world.’ Herbert anticipated this challenge; he met the mutilated world with a sober eye and an electric voice.” - Los Angeles Times
“A standout in this season’s crop is Zbigniew Herbert’s “Collected Poems,” a strapping posthumous compendium that for the first time places all the essential work of this indispensable modern poet in the hands of English-speaking readers. It’s an edition that’s long overdue… Even making the obligatory allowances for the vexations of translation, Herbert’s penchant for freighting oblique irony with unswerving moral authority is readily evident -- his spartan rhetoric and hard - bitten wit provide the perfect cover for an imagination bent on conducting an underground resistance campaign against what Milosz famously called ‘the captive mind.’” - Boston Globe
“Now, nearly 10 years after his death, Herbert’s voice is gathered, uncensored and unimaginably strong, in one dynamic volume.” - San Francisco Chronicle
“English readers have cause for celebration...” - Philadelphia Inquirer
“…the new, gorgeously bound Collected Poems, 1956-1998 promises to prove [Herbert] not merely the best Polish writer in recent memory but one of the most impressive poets of the later 20th century…leaves no doubt about the place of Herbert’s work in 20th century letters, which rivals that of W. H. Auden or Elizabeth Bishop in its originality, imaginative breadth and humane vigilance.” - Washington Post Book World
“…as the long-awaited publication of his Collected Poems reveals, Herbert is almost always at his best.” - New Criterion
