Still Life With A Bridle

Name: Still Life With A Bridle
SKU: 9781907903496
Price: 14.99 GBP
Availability: InStock

Author: Zbigniew Herbert

£14.99

A gathering of artful essays by Zbigniew Herbert, one of Poland’s most translated post-war writers, is here brought to a new audience. Poet and essayist Herbert takes an intriguing look at the cultural, artistic, and aesthetic legacy of 17th-century Holland. These sixteen essays reveal his discriminating artistic eye and poetic sensibility, one that revels in irony, humour, and a satirist’s appreciation of the absurd.

An inveterate museum-goer, Zbigniew Herbert focuses on the art of the Dutch masters, using it as a stepping-off point for a thoroughly individual and entertaining examination of the foibles, genius, and character of the Dutch people as a whole, from Tulipmania to the devastating stirrings of early capitalism. Part travelogue, the result is an unorthodox and revealing glimpse into the past that gives us a keener understanding not only of a distant people, but of ourselves as well.

‘If the key to contemporary poetry is the collective experience of the last decades, Herbert has been perhaps the most skillful in expressing it.’

Czeslaw Milosz

‘Zbigniew Herbert is one of the finest and most original writers in Europe and one of the greatest Polish writers of this century. He is a figure comparable to, say, T. S. Eliot or W. H. Auden: a classical-minded avant-garde poet, playwright, and essayist who has created a cosmopolitan body of work remarkable for its intelligence and moral astringency.’

New Yorker

‘Provides English-language readers with a welcome glimpse of the terrific intelligence and attention to craft that has made Mr. Herbert one of Poland's leading writers and an essential figure in European letters.’

New York Times

Published: 31/05/2012
ISBN: 9781907903496
Extent: 216 pages