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A poet's unexpected journey through devastation toward belief

"An earnest quest for the Holy. . . . unusual, beautiful."-Adam Zagajewski

"[Kamienska is] one of the great poet-mystics."-Poetry

The author of over twenty books of verse, the poet, essayist, and translator Anna Kamienska (1920-1986) belonged to the same generation of Polish poets as Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz-a generation that, she writes, came of age "amidst the rat-tat-tat of firing squads and bomb explosions." But despite her literary stature and professional success, much of Kamienska's most moving writing is found in the pages of her Notebooks, which she never intended to publish.

The sudden death of her husband became the catalyst for one of the twentieth century's most profound spiritual records, documented within these pages. &ldqup;A non-believer wrote the Notebook's early sections," Kamienska writes. "Then comes a mental and spiritual crisis, and the drama of a faith that is never fixed, never fully attained." Composed over the course of several decades, this searching book fearlessly confronts the inevitability of death and the elusiveness of joy, situated at the crossroads of poetry and prayer.

In the tradition of Simone Weil's Waiting for Godand C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed, Kamienska's real-time record of conversion unfolds in a masterful translation by award-winning translator Clare Cavanagh.