In his book, A Defense of Ardor, Zagajewski ends an essay entitled “The Shabby and Sublime” with the statement: “We are so prosaic, so ordinary.  Do we even deserve poetry? But we, too, will be legends for future generations, because we once lived, and our word will mean more than we care to admit today.”* In the essay, he considers the poet’s need to seek out what, if anything, lasts, while still allowing poems to be infused with the present. Zagajewski’s latest collection of poems, Unseen Hand, does just that. Few political or ecstatic poems of the kind found in his earlier works are here; the poems in this collection bridge everyday existence and memory. The memories aren’t simple, however: they are the reflections of a learned man who has lived well past half a century, and in countries not his own, his life and language directly affected by changing borders and post-World War II Soviet repression of Poland. Family and friends have now passed in and out of his life because of that history as well as the simple passage of time. He acknowledges in “Vita contemplativa”: “So this is it. What we do not know. / We live in the abyss. In dark waters. In brightness.”

Zagajewski is sixty-six years old. In Unseen Hand, a new poem, “Not Thinking About Aesthetics,” refers to one of his most famous, decades-old poems, “To Go to Lvov.” Many who do not know Zagajewski’s work particularly well are familiar with “To Go to Lvov,” which describes a time and a homeland he knows only through hearsay (he and his parents were exiled from Lvov to Gliwice when he was an infant). Time contracts masterfully into one point, in memory, and we—Zagajewski, his family, the reader—are drawn into it:

                            But the cathedral rises,

you remember, so straight, as straight

as Sunday and white napkins and a bucket

full of raspberries standing on the floor, and

my desire which wasn’t born yet,

only gardens and weeds and the amber

of Queen Anne cherries, and indecent Fredro.

There was always too much of Lvov, no one could

comprehend its boroughs, hear

the murmur of each stone scorched

by the sun, at night the Orthodox church’s silence was unlike

that of the cathedral, the Jesuits

baptized plants, leaf by leaf, but they grew,

grew so mindlessly, and joy hovered

everywhere, in hallways and in coffee mills

revolving by themselves, in blue

teapots, in starch, which was the first

formalist, in drops of rain and in the thorns

of roses....**

 In “Not Thinking About Aesthetics,” Zagajewski writes that his father’s love of and copying out of “To Go to Lvov” for friends was not about the poetry, the beauty and accomplishment, but

only about the city he’d loved and lost, the city

where his early years, his epiphanies, his meetings with the world

had been detained like hostages,

and he must have struck the keyboard of his faithful old

typewriter with such force that if we

better understood the conservation of energy,

we might perhaps regenerate

on this basis at least one street

of his first rapture.

In “To Go to Lvov,” we enter the imagined streets and society of the city; in “Not Thinking About Aesthetics,” we are met with the force of the father’s memory, which is both primal and transformative.

Childhood and the moment of becoming a poet (guidance of an unseen hand) is most evident in Zagajewski’s poems about a time when he and his family lived in exile (“I don’t know who we are—maybe wanderers”). History (only words, only the world) crowds into the memory of a little boy surrounded by others in exile, who must find other languages and create a new home. The poems describe neighbors, and piano lessons: “Mrs J told me right after the first /or second lesson that I should take up languages / since I showed no talent for music.” This recollection leads to the revelation:

I went home, hanging my head,

a little saddened, a little glad—home,

where there was no smell of Persia, only amateur paintings,

watercolors, and I thought with bitterness and pleasure that I had only language, only words, images,

only the world.

                

(“Piano Lesson”)

While the poems of this collection often feel more prosaic than in other collections, Zagajewski’s tone is always immediate, veiled but passionate, and the poems convey a paradoxically joyful sadness. Much of Unseen Hand is about places and people in Zagajewski’s life, especially his deceased mother and his father who now suffers from dementia. A poem that begins, “I could never say anything about my mother,” provides the details of her life from the bestsellers she read to coffee and cod and glances in a mirror, and the mirroring of something more important:

how she went on at length about things

that weren’t her strong suit and how I stupidly

teased her, for example, when she

compared herself to Beethoven going deaf,

and I said, cruelly, but you know he

had talent, and how she forgave it all

and how I remember that, and how I flew from Houston

to her funeral and couldn’t say anything

and still can’t.

   

(“Poem About My Mother”)

It is the momentarily insignificant or inconspicuous comment, he points out, which wounds us, or strikes at the heart of a relationship.

The book is not all elegies for his mother or his past; there are the playful commonplaces in poems such as “If I Were Tomaz Salamun.” In it, he celebrates his differences with the Slovenian poet as well as their commonality:

—though I also seek the flame of rapture

pretty much everywhere, even in the budget theater,

the train, and almost every café

(but that more unites than divides us).

 In Unseen Hand, he, and we, go to Jozeph Street, to Gliwice, to Krakow, to Lvov. He travels these cities in his imagination, trailing images behind him. Zagajewski writes of his family again, in “I Look at a Photograph”: “I gaze at the photograph, I can’t tear my eyes away, / and suddenly I imagine that they’re all still alive / as if nothing had happened, they still scurry to lectures, / wait for trains, take sky-blue trams…” Soon in that poem, the events begin to turn, as he acknowledges, “pogroms occur, uprisings, deportations, / the cruel Wehrmacht in becoming uniforms…” and ends with these lives of the progenitors continuing, as those who “write long letters and laconic postcards, / they’re always late, hopelessly late,” he notes, “the same as us, exactly like us, like me.” It’s the summation in the final line that brings the litany of lives to a close. It shuts the book, but more than that, it connects one time to another. In a sense, he has done here what he did in “To Go to Lvov,” gathering us all up into the palm of the unseen hand, the marriage of then and now.

*Zagajewski, Adam. In Defense of Ardor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

**Zagajewski, Adam. Without End: New and Selected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.