"This expanded edition of Postwar Polish Poetry (which was originally published in 1965) presents 125 poems by 25 poets, including Czeslaw Milosz and other Polish poets living outside Poland. The stress of the anthology is on poetry written after 1956, the year when the lifting of censorship and the berakdown of doctrines provoked and explosion of new schools and talents. The victory of Solidarity in August 1980 once again opened new vistas for a short time; the coup of December closed that chapter. It is too early yet to predict the impact these events will have on the future of Polish poetry." From Amazon.

An illuminating new study of modern Polish verse in performance, offering a major reassessment of the roles of poets and poetry in twentieth-century Polish culture. WhatÕs in a voice? Why record oneself reading a poem that also exists on paper? In recent decades, scholars have sought to answer these questions, giving due credit to the art of poetry performance in the anglophone world. Now Aleksandra Kremer trains a sharp ear on modern Polish poetry, assessing the rising importance of authorial sound recordings during the tumultuous twentieth century in Eastern Europe. Kremer traces the adoption by key Polish poets of performance practices intimately tied to new media. In Polish hands, tape recording became something different from what it had been in the West, shaped by its distinctive origins behind the Iron Curtain. The Sound of Modern Polish Poetry reconstructs the historical conditions, audio technologies, and personal motivations that informed poetic performances by such luminaries as Czes_aw Mi_osz, Wis_awa Szymborska, Aleksander Wat, Zbigniew Herbert, Miron Bia_oszewski, Anna Swir, and Tadeusz R—_ewicz. Through performances both public and private, prepared and improvised, professional and amateur, these poets tested the possibilities of the physical voice and introduced new poetic practices, reading styles, and genres to the Polish literary scene. Recording became, for these artists, a means of announcing their ambiguous place between worlds. KremerÕs is a work of criticism as well as recovery, deploying speech-analysis software to shed light on forgotten audio experimentsÑfrom poetic Òsound postcards,Ó to unusual home performances, to the final testaments of writer-performers. Collectively, their voices reveal new aesthetics of poetry reading and novel concepts of the poetic self.

Offers a guide to the major poets who found a voice for the experience of survival. This title focuses on the first post-war generation of Central and East European poets, who wrote in direct response to a war of unprecedented destruction in Europe.

Being Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland's return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland's cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland's modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.

An anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be.--Edward Hirsch

In this pathbreaking study of responses to the Holocaust in wartime and postwar Polish literature, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores seven writers’ compulsive need to share their traumatic experience of witness with the world. The Holocaust put the ideological convictions of Kornel Filipowicz, Józef Mackiewicz, Tadeusz Borowski, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, Leopold Buczkowski, Jerzy Andrzejewski, and Stefan Otwinowski to the ultimate test. Tragically, witnessing the horror of the Holocaust implied complicity with the perpetrator and produced an existential crisis that these writers, who were all exempted from the genocide thanks to their non-Jewish identities, struggled to resolve in literary form. Polish Literature and the Holocaust: Eyewitness Testimonies,1942–1947 is a particularly timely book in view of the continuing debate about the attitudes of Poles toward the Jews during the war. The literary voices from the past that Brenner examines posit questions that are as pertinent now as they were then. And so, while this book speaks to readers who are interested in literary responses to the Holocaust, it also illuminates the universal issue of the responsibility of witnesses toward the victims of any atrocity.

The Polish Complex takes place on Christmas Eve, from early morning until late in the evening, as a line of people (including the narrator, whose name is Konwicki) stand and wait in front of a jewelry store in Warsaw. Through the narrator we are told of what happens among those standing in line outside this store, what happens as the narrator's mind thinks and rants about the current state of Poland, and what happens as he imagines the failed Polish rebellion of 1863. The novel's form allows Konwicki (both character and author) to roam around and through Poland's past and present, and to range freely through whatever comes to his attention. By turns comic, lyrical, despairing, and liberating, The Polish Complex stands as one of the most important novels to have come out of Poland since World War II.