SOURCE: A review of Poezja, in World Literature Today, Vol. 63, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 332–33.

In the following review, Levine asserts that Różewicz's Poezja demonstrates how the poet's work “has come full circle.”

The fruits of almost forty years of poetry writing are gathered together in the new two-volume edition of Tadeusz Różewicz's poems [Poezja]. The 1988 edition recapitulates, with only minor changes, the 1976 volume Poezje zebrane and adds to the earlier collection approximately fifty new works that have appeared in print during the last decade or so.

It will come as no surprise to readers who are familiar with Różewicz's poetry that the post–1976 poems are centered on two obsessive themes: the depressing inevitability of death, and the inadequacy of poetry in the contemporary world. Różewicz began his literary career by writing about mass death in wartime, the death of the young, and the death of...