Ewa Lipska is one of 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 philosophical questions of evil. Lipska is capable of being awed by beauty despite the deep pessimism that flows through her poems, including the failure of language itself to have any ameliorative effect on human experience. Surreal, skeptical, and laced with wit, Lipska’s poetry, like that of Milosz and Szymborska, seems to effortlessly achieve a kind of hard-won and gracefully wielded authority that tells us something essential about the legacies of the twentieth century’s horrors.

Ewa Lipska was born in Krakow in 1945, and since her first book in 1967 has published eighteen volumes of poetry. The New Century is her third book to appear in English, following Pet Shops and Other Poems (Arc, 2002) and Poet? Criminal? Madman? (Forest Books, 1991). From 1991 to 1997 she was Deputy Director and then Director of the Polish Cultural Institute in Vienna.