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Search - Eternal Enemies: Poems

Eternal Enemies Poems
Author: Adam Zagajewski

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 ... more »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. Adam Zagajewski was born in Lvov, Poland, in 1945. his previous books include Tremor, Canvas, Mysticism for Beginners, Without End, Two Cities, Another Beauty, and A Defense of Ardor?all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He lives in Kraców, Paris, and Chicago. Clare Cavanagh is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. She has translated numerous volumes of Polish poetry and prose, including the work of Wislawa Szymborska. One of the most gifted poets of our time, Adam Zagajewski is a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limped economy of style that are the trademarks of his work. 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 are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or from books?people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake. These poems intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life. "Not so long ago we had two incredible voices?Neruda and Milosz. Now we have Adam Zagajewski, who also speaks passionately from both the historical and the personal perspective, in poems reduced to a clean, lyrical clarity. In one poet's opinion (mine), he is now our greatest and truest representative, the most pertinent, impressive, meaningful poet of our time."?Mary Oliver "Not so long ago we had two incredible voices?Neruda and Milosz. Now we have Adam Zagajewski, who also speaks passionately from both the historical and the personal perspective, in poems reduced to a clean, lyrical clarity. In one poet's opinion (mine), he is now our greatest and truest representative, the most pertinent, impressive, meaningful poet of our time."?Mary Oliver

"Mr. Zagajewski, who was born in Poland in 1945, is one of the few foreign-language poets to be regularly translated into English. He is often mentioned in the same breath as Czeslaw Milosz, in part simply because he is the most famous Polish poet of the generation after Milosz's. Mr. Zagajewski is writing Milosz's biography, and it would be surprising if he didn't eventually follow his subject to Stockholm. But there is also a deeper similarity, since the two poets, products of the same Polish experience, share a basic theme: the dilemma of the spirit trapped in history, of freedom constrained by necessity. These are two ways of naming the opponents invoked in the title of Eternal Enemies, Mr. Zagajewski's fifth collection of poems to appear in English (translated by Clare Cavanagh). For Milosz, who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and defected from Poland's Communist regime, spirit and history were mortal foes, locked in a permanent death grip. For Mr. Zagajewski, who belongs to the generation of Solidarity and of the Velvet Revolutions, their enmity is less acute, more a chronic condition to be lived with. In his poems, the ordinary world is always quivering at the brink of, but never quite yielding to, ecstasy . . . Forced to emigrate from Poland in the 1970s, Mr. Zagajewski lived for many years in France and America. He has now returned to Krakow, the city of his youth; but the habit of wandering remains, and Eternal Enemies alternates views of his childhood streets with a traveler's snapshots . . . Yet most of the traveling in Eternal Enemies is done under rather plusher circumstances than this suggests, and there is a certain danger?as we follow the poet from 'Sicily' to 'Rome, Open City' to 'Camogli' and 'Staglieno'?that Mr. Zagajewski's voyaging will turn into a higher tourism, yielding a succession of interchangeable epiphanies. 'What happened to summer's plans / and our dreams, / what has our youth become,' he asks in 'Camogli.' This kind of undefended, melancholy lyricism has always been one of the distinctive notes of Mr. Zagajewski's verse. It makes one think of songs by Schumann, more than anything in English poetry, and in fact Mr. Zagajewski often invokes music to achieve his effects . . . In 'Long Street,' he employs his gift for surprising, witty metaphors to describe a remembered Krakow street: 'a street of dwarves and giants, creaking bikes, / a street of small towns clustered / in one room, napping after lunch, / heads dropped on a soiled tablecloth . . .' The drama of homecoming, after a lifetime filled with so much experience and reflection, is very moving, and gives Eternal Enemies its beautifully autumnal quality."?Adam Kirsch, The New York Sun

"To open Adam Zagajewski's new book Eternal Enemies is to find oneself in motion. 'To travel without baggage, sleep in the train / on a hard wooden bench, / forget your native land,' begins 'En Route.' A few pages later the narrator wonders whether it was 'worth waiting in consulates / for some clerk's fleeting good humor' and 'worth taking the underground / beneath I can't recall what city' ('Was It'). Other poems find him in cars, imagining the 'great ships that wandered the ocean,' on a plane flying over the arctic, on more trains, and occasionally on foot. Often the motion is not just from one city or country to another, but from one historical era to another. In 'Notes from a Trip to Famous Excavations,' for instance, the narrator sees 'campaign slogans on the walls / and know[s] that the elections ended long ago,' yet when a gate swings open, the past becomes present as 'wine returns to the pitchers, / and love comes back to the homesteads / where it once dwelled.' The poems move, as well, from concrete particular to the abstract and transcendent?from an epiphany, as Zagajewski once wrote in an essay, to the kitchen and 'the envelope holding the telephone bill.' Some of poems' loveliest effects are achieved by juxtaposing one time or dimension with another, as in 'Star,' the opening poem . . . Zagajewki's places are always more than simply places. They are both mythical and real, a quality that will come through even for readers who are less traveled and don't put down the book long enough to Google the names.

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ISBN-13: 9780374216344
ISBN-10: 0374216347
Publication Date: 3/18/2008
Pages: 128
Edition: 1st
Rating:

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Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 1
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Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> Poetry >> General
Literature & Fiction >> Poetry >> Single Authors >> Continental European

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