Though best known as poets, Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), and Adam Zagajewski (b. 1945) also wrote some of the most original prose of this century. It is this prose -- remarkable for its cross-cultural complexity and interdisciplinary richness -- that concerns Bozena Shallcross in Through the Poet's Eye. The travels undertaken by these East European poets, who journeyed to the West under different circumstances, give Shallcross her point of departure as she explores the connections between the sensory experience of travel and the perception of the visual arts found in their writings.

Demonstrating the link between works of art, the epiphanic responses they produce, and the reality of travel, these writers' journeys attest to the creative primacy of vision, the core of which is molded by still life and abstract painting; in doing so, they create a testimony that connects each of them in his own way to the stream of West European culture.