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 "A strange and beautiful testimony." (Merging). "Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective." (Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a "Poete maudit" and solidarity with a hurt and manipulated community). The collection Our Life Grows appeared first in an edition crippled by Communist censorship, then in 1978 in the uncensored Paris edition which 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 post-war Europe.