Adam Zagajewski - Without End: New and Selected Poems


Without End: New and Selected Poems is a brilliant collection of poems by Adam Zagajewski. It contains 48 poems and 9 early (1970-1975) poems, all translated by Clare Cavanagh. Generous samplings are reprinted from Zagajewski's previous books:

Content.

Zagajewski is a poet of loss, of life before his birth, his own life, life without him, and life after his death.

While he is ready to write of ideas and emotions, he also fills his poems with the concrete world. From picking 30 or so poems at random in the book, I counted:

Just from this small list, an average poem could have three different specifics that ground us, the same way that the specifics of nature ground us in a haiku.

Form.

Size ranges from 3 to 90 or more lines per poem. Often the poems are a single stanza, though sometimes a poem is divided into unequal stanzas or into equal stanzas each of 3, or 4, or 5, or 7, or 9 lines. The lines are of unequal length so the right margins are jagged. The translations are not rhymed, so perhaps the originals are not rhymed either.

Role models.

Buy and read and re-read Adam Zagajewski's Without End: New and Selected Poems (2002) or any other collection by Adam Zagajewski. These poems are your role models.

Links and Books.


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