Pet Shops and Other Poems
by Ewa Lipska
Bilingual English / Polish edition
Translated by Barbara Bogoczek and Tony Howard
Parallel text Polish / English
Part of our Arc Translations series edited by Jean Boase-Beier
Ewa Lipska is one of Poland's foremost poets, emerging in the 1960s as a leading voice in the young generation of New Wave poets and quickly establishing herself as one of the key critical voices of the postwar generation.
Over the years, her focus has subtly adjusted itself to match the political upheavals she has witnessed at close hand and her concise 'shorthand' poetry operates on many levels simultaneously — she is at one and the same time a journalist, psychologist, surrealist and metaphysician.
In the words of her translators, to read Ewa Lipska's witty, beautiful and unsettling poetry is a challenge but also a privilege, because as we read she allows us to share in her sophisticated intelligence — sometimes laconic, sometimes scorching, sometimes wistful, always humane — and to feel for a moment that it is our own.
Paperback
92 pages
ISBN 1-900072-52-1
Published January 2002