Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 in Lwow. The handsome city, inhabited in those years mostly by Poles though surrounded by Ukrainian and Ruthenian farms, was one of those sleepy, cultured outposts in Eastern Europe that still survived from Habsburg days. Herbert conjures up its atmosphere elegantly in three lines about his father, who was a bank manager:

My father liked Anatole France
and smoked Macedonian tobacco
with its blue clouds of fragrance...

He went to one of the best schools in Lwow, the King Kazimierz Wielki gymnasium, and received a classical education just like that of any middle-class boy in Central Europe at that time. It is easy to forget that, unlike Russians, all the older Poles who lived through communism and came out of it again, were brought up in an earlier, very different world, and most of them never relinquished its values. Herbert had a great-grandfather who, according to family talk, spoke English, and there was speculation that the English poet George Herbert was one of his ancestors.

This life was shattered when the Russians invaded Eastern Poland in 1939, and the Germans swept east again in 1941. Herbert's early poems contain impressionistic glimpses of the horror. In one poem,

home was a sister's cheek
a flame blew out the cheek...

Isn't it the flame that is normally blown out? In another moving early poem, Herbert compares dead soldiers to buttons - "boys sewn flatly on a heath". And in a poem written towards the end of his life he recalls, in a single poignant line, his long-dead mother, his lost home and his lost city:

Mother's outspread arms glow in the dark like an old town...