Published nearly 10 years after Kocbek's death, this book is the first bilingual (Slovene-English) collection of poetry by this dissident Slovenian author. The book opens with an informative and thought-provoking introduction by Lozar.

"[Kocbek's] poems...aptly translated with a sensitive ear and evident passion...testify to the human condition in revolution-torn countries better than any historical record."
-CBRA

Edvard Kocbek was born in 1904 in what was then Austria-Hungary. Kocbek, who began to study for the priesthood, became a student of romance languages in Berlin, Lyon, and Paris and was then a professor of French. In 1941, Kocbek, a Christian Socialist, joined the Liberation Front. After the War, he held high-ranking posts in Slovenia and Yugoslavia but fell out of favour. Before his death, he was becoming an ever more bothersome dissident. Among his prose-works are the war-time memoirs Document (1967) and Camaraderie (1972), the record of an amateur among the pros. The Collected Poems (1977) brings together work from 1934 to 1977.

Tom Lozar received a Ph.D in American Literature from the University of Toronto. He has contributed to Canadian and Slovenian publications and taught, occasionally, at the University of Ljubljana and the University of Toronto.