Magnetic Poles is a collection of essays on modern Polish and comparative literature written by Polonist George (György) Gömöri who teaches at the University of Cambridge. Born in Hungary he took part in the 1956 revolution, studied at the Universities of Budapest and Oxford, taught at Berkeley, and did research at Harvard before taking up his present post in Cambridge. His publications include Polish and Hungarian Poetry 1945 to 1956, (Oxford, 1966), a monograph of nineteenth-century Polish poet Cyprian Norwid and numerous essays on the literature of the late Renaissance and early Baroque. Magnetic Poles is a collection of essays written over a period of thirty years. Some of the essays are more broadly informative than analytical, while others focus on a specific theme highlighting the priorities of the writer or poet in question and are approached from a comparative angle. Essays are devoted to outstanding Polish writers including Nobel Prize winning poet Czestaw Mitosz, prose-writers Witold Gombrowicz and Marek Hłasko, and poet-essayist Zbigniew Herbert.