The Reemergence of a Modern Master

and its noble body

is permeated by false warmth

-- Pebbles cannot be tamed

to the end they will look at us

with a calm and very clear eye

(from "Pebble")

This is quintessential Herbert: His sparse punctuation, understatement and delicate irony always take priority over ostentatious imagery or verbal acrobatics. Far from maudlin hyperbole, his remorse arises from a grave awareness of how the imagination always transforms and often distorts the objects of its attention.

In one of Herbert's magisterial prose poems -- which boast the same wry wit, inventiveness and relentless tenderness as his verse -- he considers the decline of armchairs, which he claims "were once noble flower-eating creatures." "The despair of armchairs," the enchanting parable concludes, "is revealed in their creaking." When asked in 1968 how he could write about chairs and trees in so terrible an age, Herbert responded, "And what if the trees are unhappy?" In their stubbornness and vulnerability, Herbert's objects -- lamps, pens, trees, clouds -- aim to awaken us to the myriad betrayals of the everyday and inconsequential. "At last," he says elsewhere, "the fidelity of things opens our eyes."

Despite having witnessed systematic oppression in Poland under Nazi and Soviet occupation, Herbert aims his political critique not at regimes or ideologies but at the blindness and corruption that disfigure human intimacy. His only enemy, as Joseph Brodsky aptly suggested, is the vulgarity of the human heart. Even his own failings do not escape censure; instead, they are the most bitter to recall.

so now I sit in solitude

on a sawed-off tree trunk

in the exact center point