Herbert's Collected Poems, 1956-1998, now published for the first time in English (by Atlantic Books, £30), is a grim book. It is full of exuberance, wit and irony - but in all its 500 pages there is hardly a poem in which the cruelty of invasion or of communist rule is not felt.

He had begun writing poems as a schoolboy, and never stopped thereafter, through all Poland's upheavals. During the successive occupations, he went on studying in clandestine university classes and apparently became involved in the Polish underground resistance. But just before the Russians returned in 1944, the family moved west to Krakow. Krakow became Polish again but Lwow remained part of the Soviet Union in the postwar settlement, and the great majority of the Poles still living in the city then left it for the new western territories of Poland that had formerly belonged to Germany.

From now until the end of the Cold War, Poland lived under a communist regime. Herbert studied law, philosophy, drawing and trade. He worked in various offices, and at one point was so poor that he lived by selling his blood.

He also began publishing poems in such Catholic newspapers and magazines as the Polish Communist Party allowed to continue. But it was not until 1956 that his first volume of poems could appear. That was the year in which Wladyslaw Gomulka became First Secretary of the party, and the strict communist regime began to relax a little.

How was it that Herbert, plainly no friend of communism, was allowed to publish a book? Another writer, the comic playwright Slawomir Mrozek, whose work was full of brilliant dissident irony, once told me how absurd the post-1956 party was when it was faced with these new writers.