Eternal Enemies: Poems - Hardcover

Zagajewski, Adam

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374216347 ISBN 13: 9780374216344

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008

Synopsis

The highway became the Red Sea.
We moved through the storm like a sheer valley.
You drove; I looked at you with love.

―from "Storm"

One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books―people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake―which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.

About this title

About the Author

Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov in 1945. His books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A Defense of Ardor; Eternal Enemies;and Unseen Hand―all published by FSG. He lives in Chicago and Kraków.

Reviews

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. (Apr.)
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*Starred Review* The adversaries of the title of Zagajewski’s 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 one’s world expands in the reading. Here are streets in Kraków, beaches and fields in Sicily, the sites of ancient Greece, the grounds of north central European history—all 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 it’s impossible not to believe that the linking of loving human consciousness and eroding material history is also meant, and to consider Zagajewski’s absorbingly solemn and enlivening poetry as a blessing agent of that wedding. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374216347
• ISBN 13: 9780374216344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128