ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, “To Go to Lvov”—in his first English-language book, Tremor—I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski. Hence, perhaps, the inordinate difficulty—even for me, with my sluggishness and resistances—in approaching it now in a spirit of let’s call it serious holism. And yet, I very much wanted to do it. Something about Zagajewski’s poetry—the joyful flavors of it—seemed to me to elicit (or elicit from me) something like its dialectical opposite: something austere, grinding, agnostic, judicious. I suppose what I always liked about Zagajewski’s poetry is the sense of the poet as companion, as fellow reader and traveler, sharing his notes on books and places, in four books of essays and four collections of poems, without very much to tell them apart. (Though I’ve only met him half a dozen times at most, his voice is one of those I can hear absolutely at will.) The poems ramble woolgatheringly, and the essays are yet more aimlessly beautiful affairs than the now slightly old-fashioned-sounding label suggests; rarely do they have anything either forensic or brutally argumentative about them.
