Mer de Glace - by Malgorzata Lebda (Paperback)

About the Book

In 2021, Malgorzata Lebda ran the entire length of the longest river in Poland, the Vistula, from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea; her collection Mer de Glace, which won the Szymborska Prize, is the culmination of her remarkable journey.

Book Synopsis

In 2021, Malgorzata Lebda ran the entire length of the longest river in Poland, the Vistula, from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea - a distance of 1,113 kilometres. She set out to run as a poet, not as an athlete, to use the rhythms of her own body as a means of understanding and connecting to the rhythms of the river's body of water, under threat of environmental ruin. Mer de Glace, which won the Szymborska Award, is the introduction to her remarkable journey. A profound meditation on the porosity, reactivity and receptivity of both the body and the natural world, the collection reveals their deep interdependence.

Review Quotes

'Voracious is a visionary account of the lacework of interrelationships between people and the earth. It has a hallucinatory quality - passionate, disturbing, memorable - like a dream sent to us by a druid. Antonia Lloyd-Jones has rendered this dream in a breathtaking English translation that seethes and flickers like the scenes it depicts.'
-- Sasha Dugdale, author of The Strongbox (praise for Voracious)

'Voracious is gorgeous, vivid, timeless, a novel about a small place and a small family as a microcosm of the human family and the whole world at this particular moment in time.'
-- Sara Baume, author of Handiwork (praise for Voracious)

'"It's the job of the senses to turn into words", writes Malgorzata Lebda in "Geography". Her poems operate like a dog's sense of smell in darkness: they venture forth with a clarity heightened by a tender knowledge of the embodied quality of all things - human, animal, celestial, natural, unnatural and linguistic. From a culture with an unparalleled tradition of poetry, Lebda is another truly fine poet from Poland. Her poetic vision is so singular and her style so distinctive we already have in usage the term "Lebda-esque".'
-- Alice Lyons, author of Oona

'A dark, gorgeous and haunting book about bodies, attention and care'
-- Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall (praise for Voracious)

'Life and death are beautifully balanced in Lebda's lyrical novel.'
-- Olga Tokarczuk, author of The Empusium (praise for Voracious)

'Malgorzata Lebda's poetry never ceases to amaze the reader. Even a chance encounter with it imperceptibly creates an everlasting connection. As eternal as the bond between the frozen sea and the forest.'
-- Olga Tokarczuk, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

'Malgorzata Lebda's startling Mer de Glace - so necessary for our ecological moment - connects the body to landscapes, reviving that ancient intimacy through language fertile as black soil, bright as sun on glacial ice, and urgent as a dog's moonlit howl.'
-- Michael Downs, author of The Greatest Show: Stories

'This is ecopoetry at its most profound and informal, challenging and pleasurable.'
-- Fiona Sampson, Guardian

'What does a poet see when she runs along an entire river? In Mer de Glace, Malgorzata Lebda presents poems of extraordinary attentiveness to sensory experience, finding in tiny details such as the closing of an eyelid or the flesh of a greengage plum the same life force that courses beneath the glacier of the book's title. Dense and luminous, these poetic missives from a body in motion amount to a radical act of presence that runs along the nerve between the intimate and the immense - rooted in landscape, language, and the rhythm of one foot placed in front of another.'
-- Scotia Gilroy, writer and translator

About the Author

Malgorzata Lebda is a Polish poet, fiction writer and ultramarathon runner. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Mer de Glace which received the prestigious Wislawa Szymborska Prize, and Dunaj. Chyle pola which was awarded the Kościelski Foundation Award. In 2023, Lebda published her prose debut, Lakome (Voracious). The novel has been translated into English by Antonia Lloyd-Jones (Linden Editions, 2025), and a film adaptation will be released in 2027. Her books have been translated into numerous languages, including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian, Czech, Serbian, Ukrainian, Slovenian and Danish. She grew up in a hamlet in the Beskid Mountains and still lives in the countryside, sharing her life between the Beskid Mountains and a meadow house in the Suwalki Gap. She is currently working on her second novel.