Eternal Enemies

January 21, 2008
Celebrated on two continents, Polish poet Zagajewski (A Defense of Ardor
) looks back with some self-consciousness, in these new poems, at the lyricism of his compatriot Czeslaw Milosz, at the prewar Poland he portrayed, and at a Miloszian mixture of pathos, faith and doubt. Set in Krakow, Italy, Houston and New York, these frequently brief and always inviting works present, at their most general, “the world’s materiality at dawn—/ and the soul’s frailty.” More specific elegies remember Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Wat, W.G. Sebald, or look back on the poet’s own “childhood, which evaporated/ like a puddle gleaming with a rainbow of gasoline.” Cavanagh’s supple translations let the verse sing in American English without making this Polish poet sound too American: as much as he embraces his new home (he is now teaching at the University of Chicago), he remembers, too, that “the Holocaust Museum in Washington” holds “my childhood, my wagons, my rust.” Perhaps narrow in their sweet, sad moods, Zagajewski’s poems remain wide in their sympathies. One especially ambitious work imagines the people of the ancient Near East coming alive again, startling archeologists: “Look, a flame stirs from the ashes./ Yes, I recognize the face.”

Starred review from March 15, 2008
The adversaries of the title of Zagajewskis ample new collection are, he says in the wedding-celebration piece Epithalamium, love and time, but to read these poems is to ask whether the animosity between love and time is all that consequential. For Zagajewski conjures the way things used to be so convincingly that ones world expands in the reading. Here are streets in Krakw, beaches and fields in Sicily, the sites of ancient Greece, the grounds of north central European historyall alive in the mind that loves and ponders them, that takes them personally, so to speak, and transferred, via precise and piercingly intelligent language, to the reader as a world to be embraced as the poet embraces it. Epithalamium also asserts that only in marriage do love and time . . . join forces and allow us to see the essence of other beings. To be sure, marriage of a man and woman (indeed, of one particular couple) is meant, but its impossible not to believe that the linking of loving human consciousness and eroding material history is also meant, and to consider Zagajewskis absorbingly solemn and enlivening poetry as a blessing agent of that wedding.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)