Zagajewski’s poetic evolution

is clearly charted in “Without End,“ a new anthology of his work that is made up of his three English-language collections — Tremor“ (1985), “Canvas“ (1991) and “Mysticism for Beginners“ (1997) — as well as his most recent work and new translations of some early poems.
Today Zagajewski divides his time between Krakow, Paris and Houston (where he teaches at the University of Houston), all of which figure in his poetry alongside the omnipresent Lwow as landmarks in a Heraclitean universe. Zagajewski’s poems lead us through these and other worlds, until they become as much about the passage among places as the places themselves. “Every step you take / leaves a trace that cannot be erased,“ he writes. The result is a cumulative mapping of such traces, a compression of multiple realities where one never displaces another but all exist in the single moment of the poem. This compression can be electrifying: “Russia Comes Into Poland,“ dedicated to Joseph Brodsky, has all the dramatic intensity of Tadeusz Kantor’s theatrical spectacle “Wielopole Wielopole.‘ / NYT *) 5.5.02
(mit „First Chapter“-Leseprobe)

WITHOUT END. New and Selected Poems.
By Adam Zagajewski.
Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Renata Gorczynski, Benjamin Ivry and C. K. Williams.
285 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.‘