146
PARTISAN
REVIEW
opens with a cycle of five short poems on Hieronymus Bosch's
Garden of
}<;arthly Delights,
in which the poet simultaneously recreates the painting's
imagery and meditates on its meaning. The last poem in this cycle explores
several persistent themes in Milosz's poetry: the irresistible, inexplicable at–
traction of sensual pleasures; the persistence in memory of the past (his na–
tive Lithuania); the ever-present awareness of death that heightens the
sensuousness of recollection:
They are incomprehensible, the things of this earth.
The lUl'e of waters. The lure of fruits.
Lure of the two breasts and long hait· of a maiden.
In rouge, in vemlillion, in that rolor of ponds
Found only in the Green Lakes near Wilno.
So that for a short moment there is no death
And time does not unreel like a skein of yarn
Thrown into an abyss.
("Earth Again")
Milosz's reference to the Green Lakes near Wilno is an example of one
of his most persistent themes. The past is doubly inaccessible because of the
inexorable forward march of time and the violent intervention of history.
By
focusing on sensory perceptions of costumes, mannerisms, the natural setting,
Milosz vies with time's power
to
obscure the past. Like Milosz, Adam Zaga–
jewski also explores themes of memory and exile. A member of the postwar
generation, Zagajewski was born in 1945 in Lvov (newly incorporated into
the Soviet Union), and was repatriated to Poland as a child. He emigrated to
Paris in 1981, after the crushing of Solidarity. Zagajewski is preoccupied with
the poignant yearning of the exile to recapture his past. He uses the condition
of exile as a vehicle for exploring the mysteries of existence. He revels in
words, savoring them as surrogates
lix
the places and experiences to which
he can never return. His poems are richly textured, woven from images that
arise out of and merge into one another in a verbal approximation of the
unencumbered flow of time:
... there was too much of Lvov, and now there isn't any, it grew
relentlessly
But scissors cut it, along the lines and through
the fiber, tailors, gardeners, censors
cut the body and the wreaths, pruning shears worked
diligently, as in a child's cutout
I
)
