Night Truck Driver is the first book-length presentation of Marcin Świetlicki's poems in English.1 Taking into account Świetlicki's importance for recent Polish literary history, an English-language collection of his poems has long been overdue, and Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese's work assembling and translating his texts is much welcome. The book is a bilingual selection of forty-nine poems from Świetlicki's twelve volumes published between 1992 and today, of which his first two books are represented in the highest number: ten poems are culled from Zimne kraje [Cold countries, 1992], and ten from Schizma [Schism, 1994]. The book finishes with seven prose poems from his 2016 collection Drobna zmiana [Minor change].Świetlicki is one of the most prominent poets of the bruLion generation that emerged in the late 1980s and published books in the early 1990s, just after the Iron Curtain fell. bruLion poets rejected the Polish Romantic paradigm and its communist-era incarnations, according to which poetry had become a mechanism through which to witness historical, political, and national misfortune, as well as to solidify readers’ ethics and collective identity. Świetlicki belonged to those bruLion poets touted as “barbarians” and “O'Harists.” They focused their texts on domestic and quotidian details, on the use of colloquial and coarse speech, on irony, roughness, and humor, as well as flirtation with mass culture, pop, and camp. Świetlicki himself formed the rock band Świetliki, with which he performed some of his texts, blurring the boundary between song lyrics and verses, and gaining widespread popularity. His poems openly rejected the old tasks of the poet as serving broader society and criticized the Polish national mythology founded on high-brow poetic discourse, as illustrated by his well-known poems “For Jan Polkowski” and “Poland” from his first book Cold Countries.The paradox of his situation was that inadvertently, Świetlicki did re-instаntiate some Romantic clichés. His self-fashioned image as a city-stroller in dark glasses, who smoked and drank freely, was not completely out of line with Romantic notions of the poet as a solitary figure. Nor did he contest the idea of the poet as a masculine rebel, and together with his peers, he reinforced what Benjamin Paloff has aptly called the “men's club” of Polish poetry. Moreover, even as he ostensibly rejected communal obligations, Świetlicki did give voice to a new social reality, and critics treated him as the poet of a new Poland, the citizens of which, like the bruLion authors, turned to privacy, individualism, and pop culture. Many of these paradoxes have continued to be discussed in recent decades. While Świetlicki has continued to mock and oppose all kinds of systems, lingos, and political agendas, as he criticized both the nationalist and the progressive discourse, and refrained from political participation, his rebellion has at times been perceived as politically blunt and safe. Similarly, his criticism of capitalist jargon has been undermined by his market success as a performer and writer.In her selection, Wójcik-Leese decided to move Świetlicki's poetry away from these paradoxes, away from the politics of anti-political declarations. The poems on Polkowski and Poland are not included in the book, and only mild references to the public sphere are retained. From the earliest poems we just learn that “the illiterate are writing a Constitution for me” (p. 9) and that the world is “a concentration garden” (p. 29), from the latest ones, that “We don't jump at their anti-government demonstrations, we are not proud of their government's deeds” (p. 105). The turn toward privacy and away from the body politic is not only declared, but also enacted by the majority of the poems selected for the book, which often focus on the speaker's relationships with his parents, partner, and son. Wójcik-Leese suggests in her afterword that the speaker sees others “ironically and tenderly” (p. 110), and indeed, this tenderness is palpable in her selection, though it is not the first association one could have with Świetlicki's poetry, in which a bitter, disillusioned tone often dominates.Wójcik-Leese's selection is an interpretation of Świetlicki that inspires a revision of his oeuvre and the canon of his poems. While the bilingual edition can surely help Polish readers with that task, for the English-language readers it is Świetlicki's first book in English, and this first instance of his Anglophone presentation evades politics. Several of Świetlicki's poems were published in English before, those on Polkowski were translated by William Martin for Chicago Review in 2000, yet it would be hard to call this small selection (or any other) canonical. In two anthologies of contemporary Polish poetry, Altered State: The New Polish Poetry (2003) and Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird (2004), selections from Świetlicki also omit some of the best-known texts in Poland.Wójcik-Leese consciously shapes her presentation of Świetlicki for English-speaking readers by focusing on his shorter poems, and on the ones that do not require any knowledge of Polish history. Although some of Świetlicki's early poems about Polish culture could actually help to place his work against the well-known clichés of Polish poetry in America, Wójcik-Leese is aware of the risks of going further in this direction. The translator not only omits poems that mock the stereotypes of the Polish fatherland, but she also steers clear of the poems that give ad hoc commentaries on current events, including those that proffer ironic quotes from media and politics, sarcastically reference well-known people, engage ad hominem remarks, and use swear words. Such texts were especially abundant in Świetlicki's collection Niskie pobudki [Low motives, 2009], from which no poems are represented in Night Truck Driver. It is not surprising that Wójcik-Leese decided to omit such context-dependent texts (which can be found in Świetlicki's more recent books in Polish, too). Nevertheless, that means the English volume does not cover the most controversial and debated aspects of Świetlicki's texts in recent years. These controversies resulted from the blurred boundary between his ironic and non-ironic uses of language, direct and indirect speech, especially when offensive expressions were used. Other critical discussions raised the issue of Świetlicki's presentation of women in his texts: female characters tended to be nameless and objectified. Some traces of this problem are also visible in the poems chosen for the English volume. In general, however, Wójcik-Leese chooses the poems that depict Świetlicki's speaker as an ironic existentialist who writes about death, solitude, and the darkness of life. This focus on the human condition makes the book more inclusive, and ultimately means that Night Truck Driver as a curated collection of poems becomes an interesting contribution to the debates surrounding the stature of Świetlicki's poems today, and contemporary Polish poetry more generally. Wójcik-Leese's selection revisits the question as to what kinds of Świetlicki's poems continue to be critically-acclaimed thirty years after his debut, and represent the core of his work.Many of Wójcik-Leese's translations capture Świetlicki's linguistic ingenuity, aptness, sound instrumentation, like in the lines: “I'm cooking from love, sowing ash” (p. 81), “not to be is harder than / not to have” (p. 69), or “‘You shout too loud’, I said to the blood, / ‘you'll wake the kid’” (p. 41). In a poetic cycle on the death of the speaker's father, both irony and tenderness can be seen, as in the image “and today I'm still burning / father's wood” (p. 91). In other texts, Świetlicki's colloquial Polish, modelled to some extent on the postwar American diction (and Frank O'Hara), is translated back into a colloquial American lingo. Yet some other lines sound less idiomatic in English, as their syntactical clarity and word order are disputable in selected instances. At times, it is also unclear why the placement of line breaks in English differs from the Polish version (especially on p. 9).Overall, Night Truck Driver is an intriguing addition to the growing list of English-language translations of contemporary Polish verse. It should be of interest both to Polish literature experts and to non-specialist poetry readers, offering different types of food for thought for each group.