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Michael Hofmann

  • Selected Poems by Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh, Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C.K. Williams
    Faber, 173 pp, £12.99, October 2004, ISBN 0 571 22425 3
  • A Defence of Ardour: Essays by Adam Zagajewski
    Farrar, Straus, 198 pp, US $14.00, October 2005, ISBN 0 374 52988 4

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.

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Vol. 27 No. 24 · 15 December 2005 » Michael Hofmann » Carousel (print version)
Pages 24-25 | 3074 words