True Life: Poems

by Adam Zagajewski, Clare Cavanagh (Translator)

Overview

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”).

Mary Oliver called Zagajewski “the most pertinent, impressive, meaningful poet of our time,” and Philip Boehm wrote in The New York Times Book Review that his poems “pull us from whatever routine threatens to dull our senses, from whatever might lull us into mere existence.” True Life, first published in Polish in 2019 and translated with genius by Clare Cavanagh, reveals the astonishing, immortal depths of Zagajewski’s insight and artistry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374612856
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	02/20/2024
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	712,616
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021) was born in Lvov, Poland. His books include Tremor; Canvas; Mysticism for Beginners; Without End; Eternal Enemies; Unseen Hand; Asymmetry; Solidarity, Solitude; Two Cities; Another Beauty; A Defense of Ardor; and Slight Exaggeration—all published by FSG. He lived in Chicago and Kraków.

Clare Cavanagh is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at Northwestern University. Her most recent book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics, received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is currently working on an authorized biography of Czeslaw Milosz. She has also translated the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska. She lives in Deerfield, Illinois.

Editorial Reviews

" 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." —Kathleen Rooney, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Zagajewski represented something more than just a talented writer—he wrote with a voice that was, and is, inimitable and enigmatic. There is nobody who sounds like Zagajewski . . . True life contains distance and melancholy as well as enthusiasm, and Zagajewski’s achievement is to show us both. He is much missed, but this volume offers readers one final gift, well worth treasuring." —Magdalena Kay, World Literature Today

"[Zagajewski's] plain, slanted observations alter the world so that you cannot help but use them to describe the history of your own life, to trace the contours of your own memories, to give order to your own present . . . Clare Cavanagh has been spinning Zagajewski’s poetry and books of essays into commonplace miracles of translation for going on thirty years, and she has done so for the last time with True Life." —Ania Szremski, 4Columns

"This tender posthumous work by Zagajewski (Two Cities) is exceptionally translated by Cavanagh, who has captured the poet’s subdued, ruminative, and wry tones . . . While devastating truths anchor the reader to a foreclosed present ('We can be stopped/ just like that/ stop'), there is evidence of hope in beauty: 'Lips parted/ Everything is still possible.' This is a remarkable collection by one of the century’s finest poets." —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"A leading light in Poland’s New Wave of poetry, as well as a celebrated poet of any country or time, his “poems about the past, cities, and movement” will be a welcome addition to every library, especially through the care of award-winning translator Clare Cavanagh." —Mandana Chaffa, Chicago Review of Books

From the Publisher

★ 12/19/2022

This tender posthumous work by Zagajewski (Two Cities) is exceptionally translated by Cavanagh, who has captured the poet’s subdued, ruminative, and wry tones. Zagajewski (1945–2021) recalls a Polish professor, “tall, thin/ as an exclamation point that has lost its faith,” and a beloved poet who’s recently died, who inspires the adage “Friendship is the prose of love.” Other poems turn their attention to Belzec, one of the SS killing centers in German-occupied Poland: “Only cinders and grief remain, only quiet.” Hospitals, cemeteries, museums, and small towns where “the shadows/ are more real/ than things” are some of the collection’s unusual settings. Overcome by “the shriek of recollection” in one such place (“not a city now but a tropical forest of memories”), the poet borrows a pen from a gas station attendant to jot down notes for a poem. While devastating truths anchor the reader to a foreclosed present (“We can be stopped/ just like that/ stop”), there is evidence of hope in beauty: “Lips parted/ Everything is still possible.” This is a remarkable collection by one of the century’s finest poets. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 02/01/2023

This final collection of new works from distinguished Polish poet Zagajewski (1945–2021) is a lyrical meditation on the mysteries of the ordinary and the paradoxes of perception. First published in Poland in 2019, it is available in English for the first time in a warm and clear translation by the gifted Slavic scholar and translator Cavanagh, which is a cause for celebration. With its allusion to an aging Tolstoy, the first poem acts as a kind of overture as it considers seeing things—a field, a riverbank, the world, life—as if for the first time. Tolstoy's declared hero was always truth and his subject always life, and Zagajewski's poems lead the reader down that same path, encouraging us to look at the world with open eyes. Though the poems are mostly brief lyrical vignettes about places and people, they reverberate with a kind of prophetic voice, as if crying out in the wilderness: open your eyes, look at the wonder, the beauty, the sorrow and the strangeness of life all around you. VERDICT Readers who enjoy W.S. Merwin, Mary Oliver, and Jane Kenyon will feel quite at home with Zagajewski's poems; like those writers, he is never obscure or tentative but always luminous and alive. Essential for academic libraries and a worthy purchase for contemporary poetry collections in public libraries.—Herman Sutter

Library Journal