We’re delighted to launch the year in book clubs with a fantastic new club on the Collected Poems of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. Conducting interviews, holding forth on individual poems and encouraging discussion this month are James Marcus and Cynthia Haven.

James Marcus is an author and translator whose work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, Salon, Newsday, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Book Review, Lingua Franca, The Nation, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among other publications. He blogs regularly at the House of Mirth.

Cynthia Haven is a literary critic and author whose work appears regularly in The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post Bookworld, The Los Angeles Times Book Review and The Cortland Review. She is the editor of Czesław Miłosz: Conversations, and Joseph Brodsky: Conversations, two collections of interviews published by the University Press of Mississippi. Her book-length interview Peter Dale in Conversation with Cynthia Haven was published in London. Czesław Miłosz: Memories and Recollections is forthcoming. She is a 2007/2008 Milena Jesenká Journalism Fellow.

James Marcus’s introduction to Herbert is now online, as is Cynthia Haven’s interview with Peter Dale Scott, one of the earliest translators of the work of Herbert.

Discussion continues all this month, and we hope you’ll read along and join in with your comments.

—The Editors