A stunning, intimate collection by the late, great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski.
...I think I sought wisdom
(without resignation) in poems
and also a certain calm madness.
I found, much later, a moment's joy
and melancholy's dark contentment.
In “True Life”, the Polish writer Adam Zagajewski, one of the world's most admired and beloved poets, turns his gaze to the past with piercing clarity and a tone of wry, lyrical melancholy. He captures the rhythms of a city street on the page and the steady beat of the passage of time against it (“Roads cannot be destroyed // Even if peonies cover them / smelling like eternity”) and writes of the endless struggle between stasis and change, between movement and stillness (“We knew / it would be the same / as always // It would all go back to normal”).
" Zagajewski attains a scale that is epic in a poetic voice that is intimate, nearly mild . . . The poems are at an extreme of truth-telling. They deploy understatement like a talisman as they enter the grandly menacing yet oblivious borderland of our worst human doings."
Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review
"Zagajewski's books are true, of their era and eternal . . . Few poets have captured the mysterious motion through space, time, and mood that Zagajewski evokes in passing through built environments and poring over historical testaments . . . In his own broad senses of time and space, Zagajewski himself was a poet who did live everywhere, and who, thanks to such books as True Life, will continue to do so."
