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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.
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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. "I'm not the young poet who wrote / too many lines," the narrator recalls:
and wandered in the maze
of narrow streets and illusions.
The sovereign of clocks and shadows
has touched my brow with his hand
Notice how the narrator links "narrow streets" with "illusions," and "clocks" with "shadows." Small gestures like these give this poem, like many in Eternal Enemies, a tone that is somehow both wistful and particular. So too do the precise, loving references to buildings and streets that will be unfamiliar to most American readers (such as "Long Street" and "Karmelicka Street" and "Staglieno"—the first two in Krakow, the third a graveyard in Genoa, Italy, if you're wondering). 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.
The restlessness of the poems is at least partly a function of Zagajewski's long exile. Shortly after his birth, his family was forced to move from Lvov, a lovely city in what is now Ukraine, to Gliwice, a dirty industrial town further west. (Edenic memories of Lvov haunt much of Zagajewski's work, but they are present in Eternal Enemies only indirectly and in a sly reference near the end of the book.) Forty years ago, he left Poland for Paris; he taught for many years in Houston; and he now splits his time between Chicago, Paris, and Krakow, the ancient Polish city where he went to the university and began his poetic career.
Whether Zagajewski would have been a wanderer were it not for the upheavals of his youth and early adulthood is impossible to know. But it is hard to imagine him otherwise. He sees everything with an outsider's eyes. As a critic once wrote in praise of Elizabeth Bishop, another poetic vagabond, one encounters in his poems "a magical illumination of the ordinary, forcing us to examine our surroundings with the freshness of a friendly alien."
If Zagajewski is an alien, he is an alien with a sardonic sense of humor. "A bronze Boy-Zelenski gazed at me," the speaker says in "Morning," a love poem set in Krakow, "his eyes / retained the image of a firing squad, / that masterpiece of Prussian architecture." "If only we read poetry as carefully as menus in expensive restaurants," the speaker of another poem muses, and a few lines later: "Varieties of longing; the professor counted six" ("Antennas in the Rain").
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