The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called oa strange and beautiful testimony,o merging oConrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective.o Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a poote maudit and solidarity with a hurt and manipulated community. The collection Our Life Growsappeared first in an edition crippled by communist censorship, then in 1978, in the uncensored Paris edition that forms the basis for this translation. These poems, combining a biting wit and rigorously questioning mind with a surreal imagination, are a vital part of the story of postwar Europe.