The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called "a strange and beautiful testimony," merging "Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective." Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a poete maudit and solidarity with a hurt and manipulated community....

born in transit / I came upon on the place of death

So Ryszard Krynicki begins the early lyric that gave his 1969 debut volume Act of Birth its title (a poem which ends: -I live / in the place of death-). These are not simply metaphors. One of the greatest poets of postwar Poland, Krynicki was born in 1943 in a Nazi labor camp in Austria, where his parents, Polish peasants from Ukraine, served as slave laborers. Act of Birth marked the emergence of a major voice-alongside Adam Zagajewski and Stanislaw Baranczak-in Poland's -Generation of 68- or -New...