Gyorgy Petri belongs to the generation of Hungarian poets who grew up after the uprising of 1956. He made his name in the West as the most outrageous of his country's dissident authors. At home he was often praised for his strangely disquieting love poetry, which is harsh, erotic, and disenchanted. All his poems are marked by his biting humor and bluntness of language. This book includes poems from Night Song of the Personal Shadow (1991; available from Duffour) and many new pieces written since 1989.

This present collection of George Gomori's essays covers several centuries of Polish literature and its reception abroad. The first three essays are devoted to Jan Kochanowski, the greatest poet of the Polish Renaissance, followed by shorter pieces on Stefan Batory, King of Poland from 1576 to 1586, whom Montaigne thought to be 'one of the greatest princes of our age'. This is followed by a comparative essay on the Pole Mikolaj Sep Szarzynski and the Hungarian poet Balint Balassi, both important poets of the late sixteenth century, and an essay with an Amendment, investigating Sir Philip...