Since the publication of her first book in 1967, Ewa Lipska has been among the most acclaimed of contemporary Polish poets. Yet, to date she has not enjoyed the same popularity in the United States as her fellow Poles Wislawa Szymborska, Czeslaw Milosz, and her contemporary Adam Zagajewski. "The New Century: Poems," a selection of her recent work, introduces to an American audience the work of an underappreciated master.

Although Lipska s work displays an acute awareness of history and politics, she s nonetheless most concerned with individual experience and the most difficult...

Poetic, witty, and faintly surreal, Sefer delicately explores the legacy of the Holocaust for the postwar generation. The novel's protagonist, Jan Sefer, is a psychotherapist living in Vienna who finally addresses his own family background during a long postponed visit to Krak?w, his father's birthplace. Much like memory itself, Sefir speaks to us obliquely, through the juxtapositioin of images and vignettes. In their translation of Ewa Lipska's first novel, Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard deftly capture the poet's unmistakable voice - cool and precise, gently ironic, and...