Tart, cool, devoted to "a poetry which may again become anonymous," Rosewicz writes about a ruined world and the fragmentation of personality. His poems written from the museum at Auschwitz [and collected in Faces of Anxiety,] concentrate upon details like the pockets of children bound for the gas chambers "bulging / with string and stones / and little horses made of wire." "Et in Arcadia Ego," a long poem about a visit to Italy, expresses through a series of vivid contrasts the inability of a poet brought up in wartime Poland to accept the paradise around him. Rosewicz's work is not unlike that of his fellow countryman Zbigniew Herbert, but it is sharper, less tender, and uncompromisingly against all "poetic" flourishes, which he sees as deceits…. (p. 557)

Julian Symons, "New Poetry: From Auden to Ogden Nash," in Punch (© 1969 by Punch Publications Ltd.; all rights reserved; may not be reprinted without...