Customer Reviews

Elegy For The Departure

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Had Herbert hewed to the leftwing/socialist line, he would have won the Nobel Prize years ago. He didn't, however, and, like Borges, he was denied the prize in favor of much lesser writers. Thankfully he was honored by the Ingersoll Foundation a few years before his death with The T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, an award conferred for merit, not idealogy. Herbert's poems have an elegant austerity born out of his own privations and the loss he experienced and witnessed for most of his life, first at the hands of the Nazis, then the Communists. But he is not without hope and humor. The book is divided into three sections: the first comprised of early poems, the second by a sequence of wry, lovely, surprising prose poems, the last of latterday work. Among the outstanding pieces here are "A Small Bird" and the title poem, a magnificent farewell to art and to life that could well serve as Herbert's epitaph. Here's hoping his name and work win the widespread attention they deserve.

Herbert's spare poems have the elemental force of haiku. Those written in the context of Soviet Poland are also encoded--the multivalent language gives one the same thrill of Emily Dickinson-type riddles, with the additional excitement of secret messages passed to your hand through the Iron Curtain. Makes for marvellous reading.

A collection of Herbert's work that had previously been unpublished in English. Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter, very well known as translators of Herbert's work. This slender book consists of some early poems, a set of very brief poetic prose pieces, and some late poems. All are interesting. The final poems are undoubtedly the best, including several powerful poems that rank with Herbert's best, including the title poem. Important work from a great poet.

While I havent read this book, I have read much of his earlier work, and certainly his poems are the genuine article. The Rain, Apollo and Mauryas are two quite wonderful pieces that combine emotion and intellect in a seldom-encountered way. Read him.