[Poezje zebrane is a collection of sixteen books of poetry by Tadeusz Różewicz and] marks the thirteenth anniversary of Różewicz's emergence as one of Poland's outstanding postwar poets…. Różewicz was the first poet of his generation to confront the moral upheaval, the shattering of reality caused by the Nazi holocaust. His Niepokój (Anxiety; 1947) was the most outstanding postwar poetic debut. Rózewicz "the witness" became the conscience, the voice of a generation who escaped death while "led to slaughter" and the voice of the "gray man with a small stone-like and merciless imagination," obsessed with recording accumulated war images, bringing humanity to trial.

Różewicz's themes—martyrdom; the destruction of his small-town world, the center of stability; the guilt of man, stripped of humanity—required a new poetic idom. Różewicz's break with conventional poetics corresponds to the final break with the past. Stripped...