True Life

Starred review from December 19, 2022
This tender posthumous work by Zagajewski (Two Cities) is exceptionally translated by Cavanagh, who has captured the poet’s subdued, ruminative, and wry tones. Zagajewski (1945–2021) recalls a Polish professor, “tall, thin/ as an exclamation point that has lost its faith,” and a beloved poet who’s recently died, who inspires the adage “Friendship is the prose of love.” Other poems turn their attention to Belzec, one of the SS killing centers in German-occupied Poland: “Only cinders and grief remain, only quiet.” Hospitals, cemeteries, museums, and small towns where “the shadows/ are more real/ than things” are some of the collection’s unusual settings. Overcome by “the shriek of recollection” in one such place (“not a city now but a tropical forest of memories”), the poet borrows a pen from a gas station attendant to jot down notes for a poem. While devastating truths anchor the reader to a foreclosed present (“We can be stopped/ just like that/ stop”), there is evidence of hope in beauty: “Lips parted/ Everything is still possible.” This is a remarkable collection by one of the century’s finest poets.

January 6, 2023
This collection is only posthumous in translation. While Zagajewski's life ended in 2021, True Life first appeared in Poland in 2019. Cavanaugh, his outstanding translator, has found a pitch for his voice that contains as many variations on his narrow range of themes as an arpeggiated chord in a minor key. These works offer two kinds of consolation. While some poems sound as if the world's a place one might--must--feel better about, others offer something rarer, more exacting than relief. In "Charlie," an elegy for his friend, the poet C. K. Williams, an instance of the first, Zagajewski observes that "friendship is the prose of love." In "C�rdoba, Sparrows," an instance of the second, "trees are seized by a light tremor, / even fear, as if they'd finally realized / that this is it, they have nowhere to go." Set at dusk, the poem also captures how the setting sun touches leaves so that one side is more reflective than the other. This volume is a monument to such moments, a cairn to guide us.

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Starred review from February 1, 2023

This final collection of new works from distinguished Polish poet Zagajewski (1945-2021) is a lyrical meditation on the mysteries of the ordinary and the paradoxes of perception. First published in Poland in 2019, it is available in English for the first time in a warm and clear translation by the gifted Slavic scholar and translator Cavanagh, which is a cause for celebration. With its allusion to an aging Tolstoy, the first poem acts as a kind of overture as it considers seeing things--a field, a riverbank, the world, life--as if for the first time. Tolstoy's declared hero was always truth and his subject always life, and Zagajewski's poems lead the reader down that same path, encouraging us to look at the world with open eyes. Though the poems are mostly brief lyrical vignettes about places and people, they reverberate with a kind of prophetic voice, as if crying out in the wilderness: open your eyes, look at the wonder, the beauty, the sorrow and the strangeness of life all around you. VERDICT Readers who enjoy W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Jane Kenyon will feel quite at home with Zagajewski's poems; like those writers, he is never obscure or tentative but always luminous and alive. Essential for academic libraries and a worthy purchase for contemporary poetry collections in public libraries.--Herman Sutter

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