They Came to See a Poet : Selected Poems

Tadeusz Rozewicz is one of the outstanding figures in the generation of writers whose work was indelibly marked by Poland's traumatic and tragic war-time experience. 'What I produced is poetry for the horror-stricken. For those abandoned to butchery. For survivors.' Distrusting myths and archetypes, and rejecting traditional aesthetic values which struck him as offensive and gratuitous in the face of what he had witnessed, Rozewicz created a stark, direct poetry devoid of embellishment and rooted in common speech, fashioned as he has written 'out of a remnant of words, salvaged words, out of uninteresting words, words from the great rubbish dump, the great cemetery.'But Rozewicz's poetry is far from being confined to recording the horrors of the past. He is a natural social realist whose subject-matter has a very wide range, including friendship, love, eroticism, art, religion, ageing, death and the anxieties of modern civilisation. The appearance of this substantial selection, which is drawn from more than forty years of Rozewicz's prolific writing, coincides with his seventieth birthday.