SELECTED POEMS by Zbigniew Herbert (1968)
★ ★ ★ ★ .5 - A favorite poet of mine in college & I'm thrilled to discover that his work resonates even more with me today. Themes of war, tyranny, poetry, art, love, & survival of soul & flesh…
"thus one can use in poetry names of Greek shepherds one can attempt to catch the colour of morningely write of love and also once again in dead earnest offer to the betrayed world a rose"
— from “Five Men”
title: Selected Poems
author: Zbigniew Herbert
translators: Czeslaw Milosz & Peter Dale Scott
introduction: A. Alvarez
published: 1968
publisher: The Ecco Press
genre/subgenre: poetry
setting: Europe, post WWII
main themes/subjects: classical themes & imagery, archaeology, “noble” love, “high” beauty, the painter, the poet, wartime, refugees, death, dreams & longing, passion vs maturity, ptsd, propaganda, revolution & rebelionists, the beauty in small, everyday things, the importance of art & poetry to the survival of the soul
summary/blurbs/premise: “In poem after poem he strains cunningly towards the moment of final silence - 'the heart of things/a dead star/a black drop of infinity' - only, at the last moment, for the postman to knock and nudge him back into the fallen world… This tension between the ideal and the real is the backbone on which all his work depends. …in his poetry Herbert is creating a minority politics of sanity and survival.” - A. Alvarez in the Introduction
“All the lines descend into the valley of the palm into a hollow where bubbles a small spring of fate Here is the life line Look it races like an arrow the horizon of five fingers brightened by its stream which surges forth overthrowing obstacles and nothing is more beautiful more powerful than this striving forward”
— from “Fortune-telling”
my thoughts:
Zbigniew Herbert was one of my favorite poets that I discovered in college in the early 2000’s (2006 - 2011 specifically) when I was at college in Washington DC (GWU) & the other day I was over at Second Story Books which is the used bookstore that was closest to campus at the time & I stumbled across this edition of some of his poems & felt like it would be cute if I reread it so I was kind of reading the collection a bit warily because I wasn’t sure if it would hold up.
But I’m actually super pleased to see that it not only holds it but if anything resonates more with me now than it did back then. I was especially moved by the poems in Part Two pretty much all the poems in that section got annotated &/or bookmarked by me (see Quotes, Notes, &c. below). My particular favorites were: “Fortune-telling”, “I Would Like to Describe”, “Voice”, “Journey to Kraków”, “A Tale”, “Five Men”, “The Wind and the Rose”, “Wooden Bird”, “Our Fear”, & “Pebble”, but honestly like there were so many more I had to cut the list short. Check out my Quotes below because they’re all there. <3
& while I still absolutely loved the language & style of his writing equally noble & humble, grave & wry, I was struck perhaps even more on this reading with the themes of finding beauty in the small moments of our lives, the importance of poetry & art for survival in times of tyranny, & the seemingly unrelenting stupidity of human history.
i would recommend this book to readers who love beautiful, elevated yet light-hearted poetry with themes of life, love, the beauty in small things & moments, & the necessity of art to the survival of the soul. this book is best read… slowly, deliberately, & out loud, with feeling.
"what would the world be were it not filled with the incessant bustling of the poet among the birds and stones"
— from “A Tale”
final note: Love it when an old favorite gets to remain a favorite. <3
CW // ptsd, war, war crimes (incl. graphic depiction of execution by firing squad)
season: Spring
music pairing: The Last Dinner Party’s Prelude to Ecstasy just happens to be the album I was listening to while I was reading this collection & yet I feel like it complemented quite well…
further reading:
YOU CAN BE THE LAST LEAF by Maya Abu Al-Hayyat (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
THINGS YOU MAY FIND HIDDEN IN MY EAR (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ and FOREST OF NOISE (2024) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ by Mosab Abu Toha
THE BEST OF IT by Kay Ryan (1994 - 2010) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
CONTENT WARNING: EVERYTHING by Akwaeke Emezi (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
“Homecoming” from MAN MADE MONSTERS by Andrea L. Rogers (2022) ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Greek poetry, philosophy, & mythology
Tolkien’s poetry —the association here is that Herbert very much feels like a man writing over the heads of the peers, literary critics, & academics who discuss his work without truly understanding…
the work of Stephen Spender, whose work is referred to in Alvarez’s Introduction as “the young Spender’s nugatory Marxism” so obviously I gotta check him out…
Click on the star ratings beside the titles I’ve read to read my reviews/thoughts about the book.
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“we fall asleep with one hand under our head and with the other in a mound of planets”
— from “I Would Like to Describe”
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If you haven’t already, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to see more of my expanded notes, annotations, & favorite quotes from this book below. . .
A reminder that this section always includes a very big ‘WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD’ tag & is best read after you’ve had a chance to read the book yourself if you like to go in reasonably fresh.
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Quotes, Notes, & Annotations…
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