It is a book-length poem by the Nobel-prize-winning author Czeslaw Milosz, who recently turned 90.
Mr Milosz has helpfully supplied factual and reflective notes, which fill as many pages as the poem.
The history of Polish verse, as Mr Milosz tells it here, is the history of much else as well.
Mr Milosz, who participates in his poetry's translation, had long thought it untranslatable.
It was written, though, in the 1950s, not long after Mr Milosz, then a Polish diplomat, opted for exile in America.
Poland's two great poets studied there: Adam Mickiewicz nearly two centuries ago, and in the pre-war years Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prizewinner.
Mr Milosz once wrote that exile is the worst fate that may befall a poet, since poetry cannot live without its roots in native speech.
Nonetheless, poets like Mr Milosz persist in the impossible task, conscious that they can never do more than suggest a ghostly outline of the original.
He writes with insight and authority about the giants of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz from the 19th century and Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel-prize winning poet who died in 2004.
Mr Milosz is as much a philosopher as a literary critic, though one with a practical turn of mind, a wry sense of humour and a taste for irreducible particulars.
Mr Milosz liked to describe himself as the last citizen of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, a medieval superpower that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, noted for its religious and cultural tolerance.
Yet the history that Mr Milosz has witnessed epitomises the tragic story of Europe for nearly a century: from the first world war to the fall of the great monarchies, from Auschwitz and the Warsaw ghetto to the imposition of Soviet control, from the struggles of Solidarity to the globalised market-place.
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