For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, 'To Go to Lvov', in his first English-language book, Tremor (1985), 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 it was something I very much wanted to do, and something about Zagajewski's poetry - the joyful flavours of it - seemed to me to elicit (or elicit from me) something like its dialectical opposite: something austere, grinding, agnostic, judicious.

LRB 15 December 2005 | PDF Download