This titanically sized, handsomely produced volume is a one-stop library of Herbert's poems, including the first English translation of his final collection, Epilogue to a Storm . Though Seamus Heaney lionises him on the dustjacket ("a poet with all the strength of an Antaeus"), and this is also the official Year of Zbigniew Herbert in Poland, he is perhaps not the best known of the postwar European poets.

The experience of occupation affected him deeply: "the sails of our ships are rotting and no storm near the bay" he says in "Fragment". As Alissa Valles' fine translations show, he could be mordant, even melodramatic, but the images fall cleanly onto the page. "We govern ruins", Herbert says in "Report from a Besieged City"; his poetry, full of classical allusion, revived and explored "ruined" myths.