BOOKS
707
When Adam Zagajewski's selected poems were first published in
English in 1985, it was clear that he was a major poet.
Tremor
was a book
that reminded one of other great contemporary Polish poets, Milosz,
Herbert and Szymborska, especially in its preoccupation with history and
its love of irony. It was equally clear, however, that Zagajewski is an
original voice. This new, well-translated collection confirms it. His sub–
ject, if one could generalize about a poet so intellectually complex, is the
epoch's end. Not solely the end of a long and murderous century, but the
death of ideas that underwrote all our now failed utopian projects:
dreams and imagination
homeless and mad.
Philosophically and imaginatively we are once more homeless. We
are once more jailbirds from every Garden of Eden of every lofty idea.
Who could still be a follower of Hegel or Neitzsche in this age? Perhaps
some professor, but not a poet. The ode is dead; long live the elegy! The
past is like the tenement window in Zagajewski's poem called "A Warm,
Small Rain."
actors appeared,
from your dreams and my dreams;
I knew I was en route to the future, that lost
epoch - a pilgrim trekking to Rome.
"Things, do you. know suffering?" Zagajewski asks. Things, mute
witnesses to our lives, obsess all three poets. The mystery of the object is
like the mystery of a closed door that we have no way of opening. We
can only ask it questions. Zagajewski asks many difficult questions in his
poems. For instance, how have evil and beauty lived side by side, and
continue to do so even today? Here is how he begins his poem "Lava":
And what if Heraclitus and Parmenides
are both right
and two worlds exist side by side,
one serene, the other insane; one arrow
thoughtlessly hurtles, another, indulgent,
look on; the selfsame wave moves and stands stilL
"How unattainable life is," he says in a poem. For a poet for whom
philosophy begins with the "simplest apple, inscrutable, round," each po–
etic image is the evidence of the unattainable, the place where the real
and the imaginary collide, "nail scissors/ three thousand years old." In his
book of essays,
Solidarity Solitude
(published by Ecco Press), Zagajewski
