Daniel Weissbort’s anthology is an outstanding guide to the major poets who found a voice for the experience of survival. He focuses on the first post-war generation of Central and East European poets, who wrote in direct response to a war of unprecedented destruction in Europe. Their poetry, especially that of writers in the countries which came under Soviet domination, has both fascinated Western readers and has exercised a vital influence on many poets now writing in English.

Many of these twenty-eight poets first came to Western attention twenty or more years ago through translations published in Weissbort’s pioneering magazine Modern Poetry in Translation, and in the Penguin Modern European Poets series. Here Daniel Weissbort brings that generation of diverse poets together for the first time, setting their work in context and tracing their links and affinities.

The poets:

Yehuda Amichai – Ingeborg Bachmann – Johannes Bobrowski – Bertolt Brecht – Nina Cassian – Paul Celan – Hans Magnus Enzensberger – Jerzy Ficowski – Zbigniew Herbert – Vladimír Holan – Miroslav Holub – Peter Huchel – Tymoteusz Karpowicz – Edvard Kocbek – Reiner Kunze – Artur Miedzyrzecki – Slavko Mihalic – Czeslaw Milosz – Ágnes Nemes Nagy – Dan Pagis – János Pilinszky – Vasko Popa – Tadeusz Rózewicz – Nelly Sachs – Leopold Staff – Anna Swirszczynska – Wislawa Szymborska – Natan Zach