Mer De Glace

In 2021, Małgorzata 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.

‘This is ecopoetry at its most profound and informal, challenging and pleasurable.’
— Fiona Sampson, Guardian

‘Małgorzata 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