The book assembles photographs from the family album, some of his own poems, which are dedicated to his mother, a sketch with memories by the author's brother, Stanisław Różewicz, fragments of the author's diary and his mother's memoirs. "This book, which is entirely focused on the inner life of a family, is nonetheless also a reflection of a whole epoch. Through the family's experiences, the reader is taken on a journey which passes through some of the most important stages of the last century." (Anna Frajlich)

" 'Mother Departs' is not, as one might expect, a sentimental book. Instead it is about what people are in relation to their parents and in relation to their children, and it is a moving story of how parents in old age become - in a certain way - the children of their own children." (Janusz Drzewucki)

Tadeusz Różewicz received the NIKE award, the most eminent Polish literary award, in 2000 for Mother Departs.

Tadeusz Różewicz (b.1921) is an author who is impossible to categorise, whose work is unsettling, a poet who has turned to stillness and silence, who rejects poetic accessories and, it is tempting to say, a mystical writer. But he is also a classic author of the avant-garde, a precursor of postmodernism, a discoverer of inner experience. A poet whose long life has opened up to him the path to Mystery.

• Tadeusz Różewicz
  Mother Departs / Matka odchodzi
  Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie, Wrocław 1999
  © Tadeusz Różewicz, Stanisław Różewicz and Wydawnictwo Dolnośląskie
  133 x 210, 138 pages, hardcover
  ISBN 83-7023-735-5