are strongest in his essays on [Czeslaw] Milosz and [Zbigniew] Herbert, the most insightful of the pieces collected here. Both poets cast so long a shadow over contemporary letters as to make them magnets of hyperbolic praise and derision; in the few years since Milosz and Herbert died, in 2004 and 1998, respectively, critics young and old, Polish or not, have painted them as the angel or the devil, whispering muse-like into living poets' ears. The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky called Milosz "one of the greatest poets of our time," whereas in the title poem of his most recent book Krzysztof Jaworski, an outstanding voice in contemporary Polish poetry, laments "how far Brodsky's set us back. . . . And Czeslaw."from The Nation: Cures for the Common Cold War: Postwar Polish Poetry
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