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As one might expect from so restless a spirit, Zagajewski is suspicious of certainties of all kinds, religious and otherwise. His own earlier self is often the target of his critique, as when the narrator of an elegy to the Polish painter and theater director Tadeusz Kantor repents for once "having dismissed him with the pride / of someone who's done nothing himself / and despises the flaws of finished things." Although faith is a recurring theme in Eternal Enemies, it is a faith of "endless questing" and "imperfect prayers." "We don't know, we can't know," the narrator of one poem concludes, in a line calculated to unsettle devotees of the assurance of salvation, "if we'll be saved / when time ends" ("Conversation").
Eternal Enemies is Zagajewski's fifth book of poems to appear in English. Born in 1945, he emerged in the New Wave of Polish poets in the 1960s, writing raw, stripped-down verse that implicitly and sometimes overtly challenged the totalitarian political establishment of his seedtime. Zagajewski later reinvented himself, employing the first-person perspective of traditional lyric poetry, a shift that has been criticized by some as abandoning the earlier commitments.
To hint at least at what I assume is the music of the Polish originals, Clare Cavanagh, Zagajewski's longtime translator and a perceptive scholar of Slavic literature in her own right, uses intricate but usually understated patterns of sound, as in the l's and o's and b's of "that dusty little apartment in Gliwice, / in a low block in the Soviet style / that says all towns should look like barracks." ("In a Little Apartment"). The poems are so beautifully rendered it is easy to forget that English is their second language.
The book is very cleverly crafted, its three sections proceeding in loosely reverse chronological order. The streets of Krakow, and the narrator's return years after his university days, turn up frequently in the first section (as in "Star," quoted above). In the second are elegies to some of the writers who helped shape Zagajewski's own voice: Czeslaw Milosz, W. G. Sebald, Joseph Brodsky. Ancient history and myth link many of the poems in the final section- Sophocles, Syracuse, a poet from Telos who died at nineteen.
But the deep structure of the book is symphonic, with images from one poem reappearing elsewhere. "Antennas in the Rain," the book's final poem, serves as a kind of key to motifs that are developed in other poems. "Reading Milosz by an open window. The swallow's sudden trill," for instance, is the bittersweet bud from which both an elegy to Milosz and a short, haunting poem about Auschwitz blossom.
One recurring motif, which appears in poems in each of the book's three sections, is the narrator's assurance to his beloved that "music heard with you was more than music." The Caravaggio masterpiece "The Calling of Saint Matthew," in which Jesus beckons with outstretched finger to Matthew, appears in three different poems, the first focusing on Matthew himself ("was I truly / summoned to become human?"), the others on the "nobleness … of Christ's face"). The soloist in an Orthodox church "recalls the voice / of Joseph Brodsky reciting his poems / before Americans, unconvinced / by any sort of resurrection, / but glad that somebody believed" ("The Orthodox Liturgy"), a theme further developed in "Subject: Brodsky," one of the most beautiful poems in recent memory.
The voice of these poems—the mixture of faith and doubt, humor and longing, history and urgent present—is unlike anything else in contemporary poetry. If the settings accurately reflect Zagajewski's own life, his travels have not yet taken him to Sweden. If there is any justice in Stockholm, he will be invited there soon.
David Skeel, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, blogs about Christianity, law, literature, and other topics at www.lessleast.com.
Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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