True Life - Poems

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 Time