More on the January WWB Book Club

At House of Mirth James Marcus offers a preview of the upcoming Words Without Borders discussion of Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998, which promises to be quite interesting.

Next week, Cynthia Haven and I will be overseeing a Words Without Borders book club—an online conversation, more or less—devoted to Zbigniew Herbert’s The Collected Poems 1956-1998. I’d love to say that Herbert needs no introduction, but this giant of postwar poetry, who died in 1998, is still woefully undervalued in the English-speaking world. He is certainly on par with his compatriots Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, even if the Swedish Academy declined to recognize that fact. And his poems, with their pained dignity and dearth of punctuation, deliver a frisson like no other. The WWB discussion will include contributions from a wide range of Herbert experts, including (so far) Peter Dale Scott, Anna Frajlich, Andrzej Franaszek, William Martin, and Alissa Valles (who translated most of the new Ecco collection).