Poetry Criticism | Herbert, Zbigniew - Nicole Krauss (essay date January-February 1999)

Nicole Krauss (essay date January-February 1999)

SOURCE: Krauss, Nicole. “Herbert's Microscope.” PNR: Poetry Nation Review 25, no. 3 (January-February 1999): 13-16.

[In the following essay, Krauss reads several of Herbert's poems against his prose study of the Dutch masters, Still Life with a Bridle, as a study on clarity, precision and accuracy of representation across disciplines.]

A poet's sphere of activity is not the time in which he lives but reality, which is a much broader notion.

- Zbigniew Herbert

Zbigniew Herbert was a poet who felt most comfortable among tautologies, equations where nothing is lost or gained on either side, barring all possibilities of injustice: ‘a bird is a bird / slavery means slavery / a knife is a knife / death remains death’. Only at the risk of superfluousness - perhaps the excess Herbert found most distasteful - can one attempt to describe a...

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