The translation [of "The Survivor" and Other Poems] is fine, though an occasional over-dramatization mars the earlier poems which tread a very subtle line between the effective and the melodramatic. Różewicz does better when he is not writing overt social criticism or trying to be philosophical, when he leans too heavily on his references, his Shakespeare or T. S. Eliot, and his poems return self-consciously to their beginnings to create an ending which is unnatural, pat. His philosophy lies in the smaller subjects—the artist-turned toymaker ("Méliès") or in the poem "Homework Assignment on the Subject of Angels."… He likewise succeeds less in his didactic proofs of modern indifference than in the words he heaps together—so carefully that the effect is actually terse, never lush. The colloquial rubs shoulders with the elegant, the movie-montage and bare newspaper reporting mix with the capricious and romantic...