Poems of Grzegorz Musial

the long version

Grzegorz Musial's Berliner Tagebuch (1989) and Taste of Ash (1992) appeared on either side of the political fault line that was the collapse of communism in Poland. Collected here, in one volume, these works present the power and urgency of one of Poland's most important young poets. Berliner Tagebuch [Berlin Diary] addresses questions of memory, guilt, and responsibility for the Holocaust, as well as the poet's desire to resist the cruelty of time. In Taste of Ash, Musial encounters the state not merely of his own country but of Western civilization too, with love poems and spiritual dialogues of intimacy and wonder.