Available for the first time in English, Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems is an important collection from the late Zbigniew Herbert. Translated from the Polish by award-winning translators John and Bogdana Carpenter, these sixty-eight verse and prose poems span forty years of Herbert's incredible life and work. The pieces are organized chronologically from 1950 to 1990, with an emphasis on the writer's early and late poems.
Here Zbigniew Herbert's poetry turns from the public--what we have come to expect from this poet--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 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 . . . " Herbert's short prose poems read like aphorisms, deceptively whimsical but always wise: "Bears are divided into brown and white, also paws, head, and trunk. They have nice snouts, and small eyes.... Children who love Winnie-the-Pooh would give them anything, but a hunter walks in the forest and aims with his rifle between that pair of small eyes."
Elegy for the Departure and Other Poems confirms Zbigniew Herbert's place as one of the world's greatest and most influential poets.
From the Reviews:
* "Some of the short prose pieces in Part 3, written in the 1960's, seem facile, even whimsical. Here and in several of the earlier poems it is as if Herbert's cutting instrument were incising a substance softer than his customary granite. (.....) The last section, written in the later years, contains some of Herbert's most spacious work, a welling up of vitality and variety." - Richard Eder, The New York Times
* "(...) a sort of anthology that offers the reader a tantalizing view of the poetry Herbert produced in more than half a century of writing (...) its chief value is that it contains his 1990 collection, Elegy for the Departure." - Jonathan Aaron, Boston Globe