Polish Poetry in the NY Times

Somewhat surprisingly, this weekend’s New York Times Book Review has a full-length review of Zbigniew Herbert’s Collected Poems, which was a RTW book this year.

And I can’t disagree with David Orr’s opening sentiment:

. . . it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone the best poets. Even so, if cash money were on the line, you’d find few critics willing to bet against Poland. Since 1980, the Poles have two Nobel Prize-winning poets, 34 pages in the “Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry” (11 better than France, a country with 25 million more people) and enough top-flight artists to populate dozens of American creative writing departments, probably improving many of them in the process.